ColNanoVDR distills multi-vector visual retrieval without pages, 26x faster queries

_reachsumit · x · 2026-09-29

ColNanoVDR brings document-free distillation to multi-vector visual document retrieval. Its OTW objective (entropic optimal transport with learned token weights) aligns student query tokens with the teacher's—no page encoding or token correspondence needed—and provably bounds the MaxSim score difference on any page. A 149M text-only student distilled from five SOTA teachers retains 95% NDCG@5 on ViDoRe v1-v3 while encoding queries up to 26x faster and reading 12.6x less cached teacher data.

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