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Autori principali: Ayad, Mohamed Ayoub Ben, Dinzinger, Michael, Dastidar, Kanishka Ghosh, Mitrovic, Jelena, Granitzer, Michael
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04626
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author Ayad, Mohamed Ayoub Ben
Dinzinger, Michael
Dastidar, Kanishka Ghosh
Mitrovic, Jelena
Granitzer, Michael
author_facet Ayad, Mohamed Ayoub Ben
Dinzinger, Michael
Dastidar, Kanishka Ghosh
Mitrovic, Jelena
Granitzer, Michael
contents Embedding models are central to dense retrieval, semantic search, and recommendation systems, but their size often makes them impractical to deploy in resource-constrained environments such as browsers or edge devices. While smaller embedding models offer practical advantages, they typically underperform compared to their larger counterparts. To bridge this gap, we demonstrate that concatenating the raw embedding vectors of multiple small models can outperform a single larger baseline on standard retrieval benchmarks. To overcome the resulting high dimensionality of naive concatenation, we introduce a lightweight unified decoder trained with a Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) loss. This decoder maps the high-dimensional joint representation to a low-dimensional space, preserving most of the original performance without fine-tuning the base models. We also show that while concatenating more base models yields diminishing gains, the robustness of the decoder's representation under compression and quantization improves. Our experiments show that, on a subset of MTEB retrieval tasks, our concat-encode-quantize pipeline recovers 89\% of the original performance with a 48x compression factor when the pipeline is applied to a concatenation of four small embedding models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_04626
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Compressed Concatenation of Small Embedding Models
Ayad, Mohamed Ayoub Ben
Dinzinger, Michael
Dastidar, Kanishka Ghosh
Mitrovic, Jelena
Granitzer, Michael
Machine Learning
Embedding models are central to dense retrieval, semantic search, and recommendation systems, but their size often makes them impractical to deploy in resource-constrained environments such as browsers or edge devices. While smaller embedding models offer practical advantages, they typically underperform compared to their larger counterparts. To bridge this gap, we demonstrate that concatenating the raw embedding vectors of multiple small models can outperform a single larger baseline on standard retrieval benchmarks. To overcome the resulting high dimensionality of naive concatenation, we introduce a lightweight unified decoder trained with a Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) loss. This decoder maps the high-dimensional joint representation to a low-dimensional space, preserving most of the original performance without fine-tuning the base models. We also show that while concatenating more base models yields diminishing gains, the robustness of the decoder's representation under compression and quantization improves. Our experiments show that, on a subset of MTEB retrieval tasks, our concat-encode-quantize pipeline recovers 89\% of the original performance with a 48x compression factor when the pipeline is applied to a concatenation of four small embedding models.
title Compressed Concatenation of Small Embedding Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04626