20.5IRJun 5, 2025
Towards Storage-Efficient Visual Document Retrieval: An Empirical Study on Reducing Patch-Level EmbeddingsYubo Ma, Jinsong Li, Yuhang Zang et al. · pku
Despite the strong performance of ColPali/ColQwen2 in Visualized Document Retrieval (VDR), it encodes each page into multiple patch-level embeddings and leads to excessive memory usage. This empirical study investigates methods to reduce patch embeddings per page at minimum performance degradation. We evaluate two token-reduction strategies: token pruning and token merging. Regarding token pruning, we surprisingly observe that a simple random strategy outperforms other sophisticated pruning methods, though still far from satisfactory. Further analysis reveals that pruning is inherently unsuitable for VDR as it requires removing certain page embeddings without query-specific information. Turning to token merging (more suitable for VDR), we search for the optimal combinations of merging strategy across three dimensions and develop Light-ColPali/ColQwen2. It maintains 98.2% of retrieval performance with only 11.8% of original memory usage, and preserves 94.6% effectiveness at 2.8% memory footprint. We expect our empirical findings and resulting Light-ColPali/ColQwen2 offer valuable insights and establish a competitive baseline for future research towards efficient VDR.
Rapid morphology characterization of two-dimensional TMDs and lateral heterostructures based on deep learningJunqi He, Yujie Zhang, Jialu Wang et al.
Two-dimensional (2D) materials and heterostructures exhibit unique physical properties, necessitating efficient and accurate characterization methods. Leveraging advancements in artificial intelligence, we introduce a deep learning-based method for efficiently characterizing heterostructures and 2D materials, specifically MoS2-MoSe2 lateral heterostructures and MoS2 flakes with varying shapes and thicknesses. By utilizing YOLO models, we achieve an accuracy rate of over 94.67% in identifying these materials. Additionally, we explore the application of transfer learning across different materials, which further enhances model performance. This model exhibits robust generalization and anti-interference ability, ensuring reliable results in diverse scenarios. To facilitate practical use, we have developed an application that enables real-time analysis directly from optical microscope images, making the process significantly faster and more cost-effective than traditional methods. This deep learning-driven approach represents a promising tool for the rapid and accurate characterization of 2D materials, opening new avenues for research and development in material science.