小模型拼接+轻量解码,实现高效压缩与高性能检索
Compressed Concatenation of Small Embedding Models
- 多个小模型嵌入向量拼接,提升性能
- 轻量解码器压缩高维表示,保留89%原始性能
- 适合边缘设备部署,对量化鲁棒性强
嵌入模型在稠密检索、语义搜索和推荐系统中至关重要,但其规模常导致在浏览器或边缘设备等资源受限环境难以部署。尽管小型嵌入模型更易部署,但性能通常低于大型模型。我们发现,将多个小型模型的原始嵌入向量拼接,可在标准检索基准上超越单一大型基线。为解决拼接带来的高维问题,我们引入一个基于马特约什卡表示学习(MRL)损失训练的轻量级统一解码器,将高维联合表示映射至低维空间,无需微调基础模型即可保持大部分原始性能。实验表明,当对四个小型模型的拼接结果应用该压缩管道时,在部分MTEB检索任务上实现了48倍压缩率,并恢复了89%的原始性能,且解码表示在压缩和量化下表现更鲁棒。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Embedding models are central to dense retrieval, semantic search, and recommendation systems, but their size often makes them impractical to deploy in resource-constrained environments such as browsers or edge devices. While smaller embedding models offer practical advantages, they typically underperform compared to their larger counterparts. To bridge this gap, we demonstrate that concatenating the raw embedding vectors of multiple small models can outperform a single larger baseline on standard retrieval benchmarks. To overcome the resulting high dimensionality of naive concatenation, we introduce a lightweight unified decoder trained with a Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) loss. This decoder maps the high-dimensional joint representation to a low-dimensional space, preserving most of the original performance without fine-tuning the base models. We also show that while concatenating more base models yields diminishing gains, the robustness of the decoder's representation under compression and quantization improves. Our experiments show that, on a subset of MTEB retrieval tasks, our concat-encode-quantize pipeline recovers 89\% of the original performance with a 48x compression factor when the pipeline is applied to a concatenation of four small embedding models.
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