dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaFastLane: Efficient Routed Systems for Late-Interaction Retrieval
| Authors | Ramnath Kumar, Prateek Jain, Cho-Jui Hsieh |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | 2601.06389vv1 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06389 |
| License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Abstract
Late-interaction retrieval models like ColBERT achieve superior accuracy by enabling token-level interactions, but their computational cost hinders scalability and integration with Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS). We introduce FastLane, a novel retrieval framework that dynamically routes queries to their most informative representations, eliminating redundant token comparisons. FastLane employs a learnable routing mechanism optimized alongside the embedding model, leveraging self-attention and differentiable selection to maximize efficiency. Our approach reduces computational complexity by up to 30x while maintaining competitive retrieval performance. By bridging late-interaction models with ANNS, FastLane enables scalable, low-latency retrieval, making it feasible for large-scale applications such as search engines, recommendation systems, and question-answering platforms. This work opens pathways for multi-lingual, multi-modal, and long-context retrieval, pushing the frontier of efficient and adaptive information retrieval.
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"date_created": "2026-02-17T05:53:08.562000Z",
"date_modified": "2026-02-17T05:53:08.562000Z",
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"abstract": "Late-interaction retrieval models like ColBERT achieve superior accuracy by enabling token-level interactions, but their computational cost hinders scalability and integration with Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS). We introduce FastLane, a novel retrieval framework that dynamically routes queries to their most informative representations, eliminating redundant token comparisons. FastLane employs a learnable routing mechanism optimized alongside the embedding model, leveraging self-attention and differentiable selection to maximize efficiency. Our approach reduces computational complexity by up to 30x while maintaining competitive retrieval performance. By bridging late-interaction models with ANNS, FastLane enables scalable, low-latency retrieval, making it feasible for large-scale applications such as search engines, recommendation systems, and question-answering platforms. This work opens pathways for multi-lingual, multi-modal, and long-context retrieval, pushing the frontier of efficient and adaptive information retrieval.",
"arxiv_id": "2601.06389",
"authors": [
"Ramnath Kumar",
"Prateek Jain",
"Cho-Jui Hsieh"
],
"categories": [
"cs.IR"
],
"license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"title": "FastLane: Efficient Routed Systems for Late-Interaction Retrieval",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06389",
"version": "v1"
},
"schema_id": "dorsal/arxiv",
"source": {
"execution_id": "e739b80c-11cb-4444-9d27-7a7dc25ea323",
"id": "arXiv Dataset",
"type": "Model",
"variant": "snapshot-2026-01-17",
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