WARP: An Efficient Engine for Multi-Vector Retrieval

We study the efficiency of multi-vector retrieval methods like ColBERT and its recent variant XTR. We introduce WARP, a retrieval engine that drastically improves the efficiency of XTR-based ColBERT retrievers through three key innovations: (1) WARP$_\text{SELECT}$ for dynamic similarity imputation, (2) implicit decompression to bypass costly vector reconstruction, and (3) a two-stage reduction process for efficient scoring. Combined with optimized C++ kernels and specialized inference runtimes, WARP reduces end-to-end latency by 41x compared to XTR's reference implementation and thereby achieves a 3x speedup over PLAID from the the official ColBERT implementation. We study the efficiency of multi-vector retrieval methods like ColBERT and its recent variant XTR. We introduce WARP, a retrieval engine that drastically improves the efficiency of XTR-based ColBERT retrievers through three key innovations: (1) WARP$_\text{SELECT}$ for dynamic similarity imputation, (2) implicit decompression during retrieval, and (3) a two-stage reduction process for efficient scoring. Thanks also to highly-optimized C++ kernels and to the adoption of specialized inference runtimes, WARP can reduce end-to-end query latency relative to XTR's reference implementation by 41x. And it thereby achieves a 3x speedup over the official ColBERTv2 PLAID engine, while preserving retrieval quality.

QirK: Question Answering via Intermediate Representation on Knowledge Graphs

We demonstrate QirK, a system for answering natural language questions on Knowledge Graphs (KG). QirK can answer structurally complex questions that are still beyond the reach of emerging Large Language Models (LLMs). It does so using a unique combination of database technology, LLMs, and semantic search over vector embeddings. The glue for these components is an intermediate representation (IR). The input question is mapped to IR using LLMs, which is then repaired into a valid relational database query with the aid of a semantic search on vector embeddings. This allows a practical synthesis of LLM capabilities and KG reliability. A short video demonstrating QirK is available at https://youtu.be/6c81BLmOZ0U.