Score Distillation for Compact Retrievers

_reachsumit · x · 2026-07-14

Score Distillation for Compact Dense Retrievers

This research proposes a score-only distillation protocol: training a more compact dense retriever using only the teacher model's output score vectors, without needing access to the teacher's internal parameters or additional supervision.

According to the paper, this method recovers up to 50% of the performance gap between the base model and the teacher model, demonstrating that effective distillation is possible using only black-box scores.

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