How MoEdernColBERT stays tiny: 2-of-8 experts plus hash embeddings

tomaarsen · x · 2026-10-26

tomaarsen details the parameter-saving tricks in MoEdernColBERT: each transformer layer routes tokens to 2 of 8 experts plus one always-on shared expert, and the embedding table is shrunk by projecting short per-token vectors to the hidden size — saving 3.4M parameters on the 1.5M model (0.48M instead of 3.84M), though without speed gains. Pipeline: text → hash embedding → 2 transformer layers (attention + MoE MLP) → 128-d token vectors → MaxSim.

Related event: VAGOsolutions releases tiny 1.5M-115M MoE ColBERT retrieval models(10 posts)→

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