FLINT: Fixed-budget Late Interaction
Multi-vector retrieval models such as ColBERT often outperform single-vector models of comparable scale by matching queries and documents at the token level. However, retaining a vector for every token substantially increases storage requirements and slows retrieval compared to single-vector bi-encoders, limiting their scalability. We introduce FLINT (Fixed-budget Late INTeraction), an architecture that uses attention-based pooling to represent each query and document with a fixed number of embedding vectors. Unlike architectures that pool only document representations while retaining token-level queries, FLINT applies pooling symmetrically to both sides, limiting document storage and the...
| Authors | Himank Handa, Negar Arabzadeh, Matei Zaharia |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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