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Retrieval & EmbeddingsMedium· ColBERT· Late Interaction· Information Retrieval

What is 'late' about late interaction in models like Co...

The ‘lateness’ refers to the invariant that the document representation is query-independent, allowing it to be precomputed. Unlike cross-encoders, ColBERT retains per-token vectors on both sides, which are then compared using a MaxSim operation. This architecture is not merely a ‘cheaper cross-encoder’ but a distinct approach that restricts interaction to a bilinear form over precomputed vectors.

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