Query Encoder Distillation via Embedding Alignment is a Strong Baseline Method to Boost Dense Retriever Online Efficiency
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The information retrieval community has made significant progress in improving the efficiency of Dual Encoder (DE) dense passage retrieval systems, making them suitable for latency-sensitive settings. However, many proposed procedures are often too complex or resource-intensive, which makes it difficult for practitioners to adopt them or identify sources of empirical gains. Therefore, in this work, we propose a trivially simple recipe to serve as a baseline method for boosting the efficiency of DE retrievers leveraging an asymmetric architecture. Our results demonstrate that even a 2-layer, BERT-based query encoder can still retain 92.5 the BEIR benchmark via unsupervised distillation and proper student initialization. We hope that our findings will encourage the community to re-evaluate the trade-offs between method complexity and performance improvements.
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