Hierarchical Pooling: Compression for Late-Interaction Retrieval Models

antoine_chaffin · x · 2026-07-07

Background: The author previously proposed "hierarchical pooling" to compress the storage of late-interaction retrieval models (like ColBERT variants) by performing hierarchical clustering on document embeddings and iteratively merging the closest clusters. This method halves storage losslessly and can be generalized across multiple modalities. Blog and paper links are included.

Related event: Hierarchical Pooling Achieves 5x Lossless Compression for Late Interaction Retrieval(6 posts)→

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