Investigating Multi-layer Representations for Dense Passage Retrieval (2509.23861v1)

Abstract: Dense retrieval models usually adopt vectors from the last hidden layer of the document encoder to represent a document, which is in contrast to the fact that representations in different layers of a pre-trained LLM usually contain different kinds of linguistic knowledge, and behave differently during fine-tuning. Therefore, we propose to investigate utilizing representations from multiple encoder layers to make up the representation of a document, which we denote Multi-layer Representations (MLR). We first investigate how representations in different layers affect MLR's performance under the multi-vector retrieval setting, and then propose to leverage pooling strategies to reduce multi-vector models to single-vector ones to improve retrieval efficiency. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MLR over dual encoder, ME-BERT and ColBERT in the single-vector retrieval setting, as well as demonstrate that it works well with other advanced training techniques such as retrieval-oriented pre-training and hard negative mining.