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Lexically-Accelerated Dense Retrieval (arxiv.org)
22 points by softwaredoug on Oct 29, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | 2 comments on HN

In plain words: Instead of scanning every document, it uses ordinary keyword search to pick starting points, then follows a web of linked documents to find matches. At about 8 milliseconds per query, it matched the full scan's precision and recall, unlike other speed-up tricks.

Abstract

Retrieval approaches that score documents based on learned dense vectors (i.e., dense retrieval) rather than lexical signals (i.e., conventional retrieval) are increasingly popular. Their ability to identify related documents that do not necessarily contain the same terms as those appearing in the user's query (thereby improving recall) is one of their key advantages. However, to actually achieve these gains, dense retrieval approaches typically require an exhaustive search over the document collection, making them considerably more expensive at query-time than conventional lexical approaches. Several techniques aim to reduce this computational overhead by approximating the results of a full dense retriever. Although these approaches reasonably approximate the top results, they suffer in terms of recall -- one of the key advantages of dense retrieval. We introduce 'LADR' (Lexically-Accelerated Dense Retrieval), a simple-yet-effective approach that improves the efficiency of existing dense retrieval models without compromising on retrieval effectiveness. LADR uses lexical retrieval techniques to seed a dense retrieval exploration that uses a document proximity graph. We explore two variants of LADR: a proactive approach that expands the search space to the neighbors of all seed documents, and an adaptive approach that selectively searches the documents with the highest estimated relevance in an iterative fashion. Through extensive experiments across a variety of dense retrieval models, we find that LADR establishes a new dense retrieval effectiveness-efficiency Pareto frontier among approximate k nearest neighbor techniques. Further, we find that when tuned to take around 8ms per query in retrieval latency on our hardware, LADR consistently achieves both precision and recall that are on par with an exhaustive search on standard benchmarks.

Hrishikesh Kulkarni, Sean MacAvaney, Nazli Goharian, Ophir Frieder
arXiv:2307.16779 · cs.IR, cs.CL · submitted Jul 31, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · SIGIR 2023

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If this works as advertised, it will make LMM/LLM-RAG systems more effective. I've often found it amusing how as soon as we encounter significant limitations in the architecture, we come running back to search algorithms to help it along. I'm not one of those people that consider this some sort of moral slight against the LLM/LMM's intellectual capacity, my view has always been that it's a system that is or isn't intelligent, not a component. It's just funny considering some of the early "This will replace search!" prognostication which like... yes, it probably will in some sense be an integral part of future search, but the potential is so much more exciting than that.
The worst case performance of this system as described won't be better than the current worst case. It might make the average case more performant, but this paper claims the current solutions don't index at all. That's quite a statement. I would take this with a full cup of salt.