LEMUR: Learned Multi-Vector Retrieval

Abstract: Multi-vector representations generated by late interaction models, such as ColBERT, enable superior retrieval quality compared to single-vector representations in information retrieval applications. In multi-vector retrieval systems, both queries and documents are encoded using one embedding for each token, and similarity between queries and documents is measured by the MaxSim similarity measure. However, the improved recall of multi-vector retrieval comes at the expense of significantly increased latency. This necessitates designing efficient approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) algorithms for multi-vector search. In this work, we introduce LEMUR, a simple-yet-efficient framework for multi-vector similarity search. LEMUR consists of two consecutive problem reductions: We first formulate multi-vector similarity search as a supervised learning problem that can be solved using a one-hidden-layer neural network. Second, we reduce inference under this model to single-vector similarity search in its latent space, which enables the use of existing single-vector ANNS methods for speeding up retrieval. In addition to performance evaluation on ColBERTv2 embeddings, we evaluate LEMUR on embeddings generated by modern multi-vector text models and multi-vector visual document retrieval models. LEMUR is an order of magnitude faster than earlier multi-vector similarity search methods.