DistilVDR: A Compact End-to-End Visual Document Retriever via Dual-Student Distillation
Visual document retrieval (VDR) is dominated by multi-billion-parameter models that are slow to index at full corpus scale and expensive to serve. Prior compression routes either train a smaller multi-vector encoder from scratch or distil only the query side; neither yields a compact single-vector retriever end-to-end. We present DistilVDR, a 524M end-to-end VDR system distilled bilaterally from a single 8B vision-language teacher under a pointwise cosine alignment loss. All supervision comes from the frozen teacher's embedding space, which was itself trained with relevance supervision, so the student objective needs no relevance labels, negative sampling, or contrastive term. We match VD...
| Authors | Zhuchenyang Liu, Ziyi Wang, Yao Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 11 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 August 2026 |
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