Jina-ColBERT-v2: A General-Purpose Multilingual Late Interaction Retriever
This work addresses information retrieval for multilingual applications, but is incremental in nature.
The authors proposed incremental improvements to the ColBERT model architecture and training pipeline, resulting in Jina-ColBERT-v2 which demonstrates strong performance across English and multilingual retrieval tasks.
Multi-vector dense models, such as ColBERT, have proven highly effective in information retrieval. ColBERT's late interaction scoring approximates the joint query-document attention seen in cross-encoders while maintaining inference efficiency closer to traditional dense retrieval models, thanks to its bi-encoder architecture and recent optimizations in indexing and search. In this work we propose a number of incremental improvements to the ColBERT model architecture and training pipeline, using methods shown to work in the more mature single-vector embedding model training paradigm, particularly those that apply to heterogeneous multilingual data or boost efficiency with little tradeoff. Our new model, Jina-ColBERT-v2, demonstrates strong performance across a range of English and multilingual retrieval tasks.