arXiv:2602.05062cs.IRcs.LG2026-02被引 5

研究嵌入维度对信息检索性能的影响,发现性能随维度增长呈幂律提升。

Scaling Laws for Embedding Dimension in Information Retrieval

  • 通过实验分析嵌入维度与检索性能的关系,发现其符合幂律规律。
  • 在任务匹配时,维度越大性能越好,但收益递减;不匹配时性能可能下降。
  • 为模型和嵌入维度选择提供实用指导,兼顾效果与计算成本。

密集检索通过将查询和文档编码为单一稠密向量,因其简洁性和与快速近似最近邻算法的兼容性,已成为主流神经检索方法。随着任务复杂度增加,向量和内积作为基础数据结构与相似度度量的局限性日益显现。已有研究表明,单个向量和内积存在与嵌入维度相关的理论限制。鉴于嵌入维度对检索能力的关键作用,理解其在不同维度下的性能变化,对构建下一代兼顾有效性和效率的检索模型至关重要。本文对嵌入维度与检索性能的关系进行了全面分析,涵盖两种模型族及多种模型规模,构建了详细的缩放行为图景。结果表明,性能缩放符合幂律,可推导出仅依赖嵌入维度的缩放定律,以及同时考虑嵌入维度和模型规模的联合定律。对于与训练任务对齐的评估任务,性能随嵌入维度增大持续提升,但收益递减;对于不匹配的任务,性能更难预测,某些情况下维度增大反而导致性能下降。本研究为嵌入的局限性及其行为提供了新见解,并为实现最优性能的同时降低存储与计算开销提供了实用指导。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Dense retrieval, which encodes queries and documents into a single dense vector, has become the dominant neural retrieval approach due to its simplicity and compatibility with fast approximate nearest neighbor algorithms. As the tasks dense retrieval performs grow in complexity, the fundamental limitations of the underlying data structure and similarity metric -- namely vectors and inner-products -- become more apparent. Prior recent work has shown theoretical limitations inherent to single vectors and inner-products that are generally tied to the embedding dimension. Given the importance of embedding dimension for retrieval capacity, understanding how dense retrieval performance changes as embedding dimension is scaled is fundamental to building next generation retrieval models that balance effectiveness and efficiency. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between embedding dimension and retrieval performance. Our experiments include two model families and a range of model sizes from each to construct a detailed picture of embedding scaling behavior. We find that the scaling behavior fits a power law, allowing us to derive scaling laws for performance given only embedding dimension, as well as a joint law accounting for embedding dimension and model size. Our analysis shows that for evaluation tasks aligned with the training task, performance continues to improve as embedding size increases, though with diminishing returns. For evaluation data that is less aligned with the training task, we find that performance is less predictable, with performance degrading with larger embedding dimensions for certain tasks. We hope our work provides additional insight into the limitations of embeddings and their behavior as well as offers a practical guide for selecting model and embedding dimension to achieve optimal performance with reduced storage and compute costs.

嵌入维度检索系统缩放定律

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