POQD: Performance-Oriented Query Decomposer for Multi-vector retrieval

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Yaoyang, Li, Junlin, Wu, Yinjun, Chen, Zhen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Yaoyang
Li, Junlin
Wu, Yinjun
Chen, Zhen
author_facet Liu, Yaoyang
Li, Junlin
Wu, Yinjun
Chen, Zhen
contents Although Multi-Vector Retrieval (MVR) has achieved the state of the art on many information retrieval (IR) tasks, its performance highly depends on how to decompose queries into smaller pieces, say phrases or tokens. However, optimizing query decomposition for MVR performance is not end-to-end differentiable. Even worse, jointly solving this problem and training the downstream retrieval-based systems, say RAG systems could be highly inefficient. To overcome these challenges, we propose Performance-Oriented Query Decomposer (POQD), a novel query decomposition framework for MVR. POQD leverages one LLM for query decomposition and searches the optimal prompt with an LLM-based optimizer. We further propose an end-to-end training algorithm to alternatively optimize the prompt for query decomposition and the downstream models. This algorithm can achieve superior MVR performance at a reasonable training cost as our theoretical analysis suggests. POQD can be integrated seamlessly into arbitrary retrieval-based systems such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Extensive empirical studies on representative RAG-based QA tasks show that POQD outperforms existing query decomposition strategies in both retrieval performance and end-to-end QA accuracy. POQD is available at https://github.com/PKU-SDS-lab/POQD-ICML25.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19189
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle POQD: Performance-Oriented Query Decomposer for Multi-vector retrieval
Liu, Yaoyang
Li, Junlin
Wu, Yinjun
Chen, Zhen
Information Retrieval
Databases
Although Multi-Vector Retrieval (MVR) has achieved the state of the art on many information retrieval (IR) tasks, its performance highly depends on how to decompose queries into smaller pieces, say phrases or tokens. However, optimizing query decomposition for MVR performance is not end-to-end differentiable. Even worse, jointly solving this problem and training the downstream retrieval-based systems, say RAG systems could be highly inefficient. To overcome these challenges, we propose Performance-Oriented Query Decomposer (POQD), a novel query decomposition framework for MVR. POQD leverages one LLM for query decomposition and searches the optimal prompt with an LLM-based optimizer. We further propose an end-to-end training algorithm to alternatively optimize the prompt for query decomposition and the downstream models. This algorithm can achieve superior MVR performance at a reasonable training cost as our theoretical analysis suggests. POQD can be integrated seamlessly into arbitrary retrieval-based systems such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Extensive empirical studies on representative RAG-based QA tasks show that POQD outperforms existing query decomposition strategies in both retrieval performance and end-to-end QA accuracy. POQD is available at https://github.com/PKU-SDS-lab/POQD-ICML25.
title POQD: Performance-Oriented Query Decomposer for Multi-vector retrieval
topic Information Retrieval
Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19189