用单向量检索替代多向量检索的耗时步骤,实现24倍提速且不损失效果。
Multivector Reranking in the Era of Strong First-Stage Retrievers
- 将耗时的多向量查找替换为轻量单向量检索,降低候选集生成成本。
- 结合无推理稀疏检索技术,查询编码时间显著减少。
- 通过早期剪枝优化,效率提升1.8倍,适合高并发搜索场景。
学习型多向量表示虽能提升检索效果,但其实际应用受限于逐标记级检索带来的高昂开销。现有系统普遍采用“收集-精炼”策略,先通过轻量级阶段筛选候选文档再进行全量评分,然而该过程仍需在大规模标记级索引上执行昂贵搜索,常遗漏最优文档。本文在两个公开数据集上复现了多种前沿多向量检索方法,揭示了标记级收集的低效性。在此基础上,我们提出以单向量文档检索器(如学习型稀疏检索器,LSR)替代标记级收集,生成更小且语义更一致的候选集,从而将流程重构为成熟的两阶段检索架构。随着检索延迟下降,双编码器的查询编码成为主要瓶颈。为此,我们引入近期无需推理的LSR方法,验证其在保持双编码器检索效果的同时大幅压缩查询编码时间。最后,我们探索多种重排序配置,在效率、内存与效果间取得平衡,并提出两种早期剔除低质候选的技术。实验表明,这些优化使检索效率最高提升1.8倍,且无质量损失。整体上,我们的两阶段方法相较当前最优多向量系统实现超24倍加速,同时保持或超越原有检索质量。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Learned multivector representations power modern search systems with strong retrieval effectiveness, but their real-world use is limited by the high cost of exhaustive token-level retrieval. Therefore, most systems adopt a \emph{gather-and-refine} strategy, where a lightweight gather phase selects candidates for full scoring. However, this approach requires expensive searches over large token-level indexes and often misses the documents that would rank highest under full similarity. In this paper, we reproduce several state-of-the-art multivector retrieval methods on two publicly available datasets, providing a clear picture of the current multivector retrieval field and observing the inefficiency of token-level gathering. Building on top of that, we show that replacing the token-level gather phase with a single-vector document retriever -- specifically, a learned sparse retriever (LSR) -- produces a smaller and more semantically coherent candidate set. This recasts the gather-and-refine pipeline into the well-established two-stage retrieval architecture. As retrieval latency decreases, query encoding with two neural encoders becomes the dominant computational bottleneck. To mitigate this, we integrate recent inference-free LSR methods, demonstrating that they preserve the retrieval effectiveness of the dual-encoder pipeline while substantially reducing query encoding time. Finally, we investigate multiple reranking configurations that balance efficiency, memory, and effectiveness, and we introduce two optimization techniques that prune low-quality candidates early. Empirical results show that these techniques improve retrieval efficiency by up to 1.8$\times$ with no loss in quality. Overall, our two-stage approach achieves over $24\times$ speedup over the state-of-the-art multivector retrieval systems, while maintaining comparable or superior retrieval quality.
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