{"id":1187152,"date":"2026-09-23T15:24:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T22:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/eigenli-spectral-approximations-to-late-interaction\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T16:19:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T23:19:22","slug":"eigenli-spectral-approximations-to-late-interaction","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/eigenli-spectral-approximations-to-late-interaction\/","title":{"rendered":"EigenLI: Spectral Approximations to Late Interaction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Late-interaction models such as ColBERT achieve strong effectiveness by representing each document with many token-level vectors, but this expressivity leads to large indexing cost, storage footprints and expensive MaxSim scoring. We show that late-interaction representations exhibit an intrinsic low-rank structure: document token embeddings concentrate in a low-dimensional subspace that preserves most of the retrieval signal. Leveraging this observation, we introduce EigenLI, a spectral approximation framework that compresses late-interaction representations via document-specific low-dimensional subspaces. Unlike clustering or pooling methods, EigenLI identifies the dominant eigendirections of each document and uses them to construct reduced interaction representations. Empirically, <math><mi>k<\/mi><\/math>-EigenLI with <math><semantics><mrow><mtext>k le 32<\/mtext><\/mrow><annotation encoding=\"application\/x-tex\">k le 32<\/annotation><\/semantics><\/math> outperforms k-means and Ward clustering based pooling methods on ColBERTv2 and AnswerAI-ColBERT-small; GTE-ModernColBERT exhibits a different tradeoff at <math><mrow><mi>k<\/mi><mo>=<\/mo><mn>32<\/mn><\/mrow><\/math>, where clustering methods perform better. The same spectral construction also yields EigenLI-SV, an ANN-compatible single-vector representation derived from the second-order summary of the reduced structure. Across multiple datasets and all three text models, EigenLI-SV consistently outperforms comparable single-vector surrogates such as MUVERA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Late-interaction models such as ColBERT achieve strong effectiveness by representing each document with many token-level vectors, but this expressivity leads to large indexing cost, storage footprints and expensive MaxSim scoring. We show that late-interaction representations exhibit an intrinsic low-rank structure: document token embeddings concentrate in a low-dimensional subspace that preserves most of the retrieval signal. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"S. 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