Papers › A Memory Efficient Baseline for Open Domain Question Answering

A Memory Efficient Baseline for Open Domain Question Answering

30 Dec 2020arXiv:2012.15156archive 2025-07-28

Gautier Izacard, Fabio Petroni, Lucas Hosseini, Nicola De Cao, Sebastian Riedel, Edouard Grave

Recently, retrieval systems based on dense representations have led to important improvements in open-domain question answering, and related tasks. While very effective, this approach is also memory intensive, as the dense vectors for the whole knowledge source need to be kept in memory. In this paper, we study how the memory footprint of dense retriever-reader systems can be reduced. We consider three strategies to reduce the index size: dimension reduction, vector quantization and passage filtering. We evaluate our approach on two question answering benchmarks: TriviaQA and NaturalQuestions, showing that it is possible to get competitive systems using less than 6Gb of memory.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

facebookresearch/FiD mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Dimensionality ReductionOpen-Domain Question AnsweringQuantizationQuestion AnsweringRetrievalTriviaQA

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections