Preprint
Aug 2026
Retrieval Needs Multivectors: An Exponential Separation
This work provides the first explicit family of query and document sets, together with their relevance matrices, for which single-vector embeddings that rank all relevant documents above irrelevant ones require exponential size, whereas polynomial-size multi-vector embeddings suffice.
Mihir Agarwal, Viraj Agrawal, Sabyasachi Basu et al.
· 1 citation