Papers › D2LLM: Decomposed and Distilled Large Language Models for Semantic Search

D2LLM: Decomposed and Distilled Large Language Models for Semantic Search

25 Jun 2024arXiv:2406.17262archive 2025-07-28

Zihan Liao, Hang Yu, Jianguo Li, Jun Wang, Wei zhang

The key challenge in semantic search is to create models that are both accurate and efficient in pinpointing relevant sentences for queries. While BERT-style bi-encoders excel in efficiency with pre-computed embeddings, they often miss subtle nuances in search tasks. Conversely, GPT-style LLMs with cross-encoder designs capture these nuances but are computationally intensive, hindering real-time applications. In this paper, we present D2LLMs-Decomposed and Distilled LLMs for semantic search-that combines the best of both worlds. We decompose a cross-encoder into an efficient bi-encoder integrated with Pooling by Multihead Attention and an Interaction Emulation Module, achieving nuanced understanding and pre-computability. Knowledge from the LLM is distilled into this model using contrastive, rank, and feature imitation techniques. Our experiments show that D2LLM surpasses five leading baselines in terms of all metrics across three tasks, particularly improving NLI task performance by at least 6.45%. The source code is available at https://github.com/codefuse-ai/D2LLM.

PaperPDFCode

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

Code

codefuse-ai/d2llm officialmentioned in paperpytorch 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.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AttentionSoftmax

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