DocPruner: A Storage-Efficient Framework for Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Adaptive Patch-Level Embedding Pruning
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Abstract (arXiv)
Visual Document Retrieval (VDR), the task of retrieving visually-rich document pages using queries that combine visual and textual cues, is crucial for numerous real-world applications. Recent state-of-the-art methods leverage Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in a multi-vector paradigm, representing each document as patch-level embeddings to capture fine-grained details. While highly effective, this approach introduces a critical challenge: prohibitive storage overhead, as storing hundreds of vectors per page makes large-scale deployment costly and impractical. To address this, we introduce DocPruner, the first framework to employ adaptive patch-level embedding pruning for VDR to effectively reduce the storage overhead. DocPruner leverages the intra-document patch attention distribution to dynamically identify and discard redundant embeddings for each document. This adaptive mechanism enables a significant 50-60% reduction in storage for leading multi-vector VDR models with negligible degradation in document retrieval performance. Extensive experiments across more than ten representative datasets validate that DocPruner offers a robust, flexible, and effective solution for building storage-efficient, large-scale VDR systems.
Key facts. Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 96 of its 110 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2025.
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96 of 110 references.
References · 96
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 15.
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- 2025Don't Just Chase "Highlighted Tokens" in MLLMs: Revisiting Visual Holistic Context Retentioncited by 45
- 2025Scaling Beyond Context: A Survey of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Document Understandingcited by 9
- 2026Sculpting the Vector Space: Towards Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Prune-then-Merge Frameworkcited by 8
- 2026Unlocking Multimodal Document Intelligence: From Current Triumphs to Future Frontiers of Visual Document Retrievalcited by 8
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- 2025Hybrid-Vector Retrieval for Visually Rich Documents: Combining Single-Vector Efficiency and Multi-Vector Accuracycited by 4
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- 2026MM-Matryoshka: Towards Budget-Elastic Visual Document Retrieval via a 2D Multimodal Matryoshka Training Frameworkcited by 2
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- 2026Doc-REFRAG: Rethinking Multimodal Document Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 0
- 2026EigenLI: Spectral Approximations to Late Interactioncited by 0
- 2026MAGIC: Marginal-Guided Compression with Optimal Transport for Efficient Visual Document Retrievalcited by 0
- 2026AdaMerge: Tuning-Free Patch Compression for Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrievalcited by 0
- 2026AdaMerge: Tuning-Free Patch Compression for Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval18 Sep 2026
- 2026MAGIC: Marginal-Guided Compression with Optimal Transport for Efficient Visual Document Retrieval17 Sep 2026
- 2026EigenLI: Spectral Approximations to Late Interaction7 Sep 2026
- 2026Doc-REFRAG: Rethinking Multimodal Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation31 Aug 2026
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- 2026AnchorFold: A Focus-Then-Fold Framework via Recursive Attention Propagation for Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval9 Aug 2026
- 2026MM-Matryoshka: Towards Budget-Elastic Visual Document Retrieval via a 2D Multimodal Matryoshka Training Framework3 Jun 2026
- 2026Visual Late Chunking: An Empirical Study of Contextual Chunking for Efficient Visual Document Retrieval11 Apr 2026
- 2026NanoVDR: Distilling a 2B Vision-Language Retriever into a 70M Text-Only Encoder for Visual Document Retrieval13 Mar 2026
- 2026Beyond the Grid: Layout-Informed Multi-Vector Retrieval with Parsed Visual Document Representations2 Mar 2026
- 2026Unlocking Multimodal Document Intelligence: From Current Triumphs to Future Frontiers of Visual Document Retrieval23 Feb 2026
- 2026Sculpting the Vector Space: Towards Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Prune-then-Merge Framework23 Feb 2026
7 more
- 2026LEMUR: Learned Multi-Vector Retrieval29 Jan 2026
- 2026CausalEmbed: Auto-Regressive Multi-Vector Generation in Latent Space for Visual Document Embedding29 Jan 2026
- 2026Structural Anchor Pruning: Training-Free Multi-Vector Compression for Visual Document Retrieval27 Jan 2026
- 2025Roles of MLLMs in Visually Rich Document Retrieval for RAG: A Survey16 Dec 2025
- 2025Hybrid-Vector Retrieval for Visually Rich Documents: Combining Single-Vector Efficiency and Multi-Vector Accuracy25 Oct 2025
- 2025Scaling Beyond Context: A Survey of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Document Understanding17 Oct 2025
- 2025Don't Just Chase "Highlighted Tokens" in MLLMs: Revisiting Visual Holistic Context Retention3 Oct 2025
- 2025Don't Just Chase "Highlighted Tokens" in MLLMs: Revisiting Visual Holistic Context Retentioncited by 45
- 2026Structural Anchor Pruning: Training-Free Multi-Vector Compression for Visual Document Retrievalcited by 6
- 2026CausalEmbed: Auto-Regressive Multi-Vector Generation in Latent Space for Visual Document Embeddingcited by 6
- 2026NanoVDR: Distilling a 2B Vision-Language Retriever into a 70M Text-Only Encoder for Visual Document Retrievalcited by 2
- 2026MM-Matryoshka: Towards Budget-Elastic Visual Document Retrieval via a 2D Multimodal Matryoshka Training Frameworkcited by 2
- 2026MM-Matryoshka: Towards Budget-Elastic Visual Document Retrieval via a 2D Multimodal Matryoshka Training Framework3 Jun 2026
- 2026NanoVDR: Distilling a 2B Vision-Language Retriever into a 70M Text-Only Encoder for Visual Document Retrieval13 Mar 2026
- 2026CausalEmbed: Auto-Regressive Multi-Vector Generation in Latent Space for Visual Document Embedding29 Jan 2026
- 2026Structural Anchor Pruning: Training-Free Multi-Vector Compression for Visual Document Retrieval27 Jan 2026
- 2025Don't Just Chase "Highlighted Tokens" in MLLMs: Revisiting Visual Holistic Context Retention3 Oct 2025
- 2026Sculpting the Vector Space: Towards Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Prune-then-Merge Frameworkcited by 8
- 2026Unlocking Multimodal Document Intelligence: From Current Triumphs to Future Frontiers of Visual Document Retrievalcited by 8
- 2026Visual Late Chunking: An Empirical Study of Contextual Chunking for Efficient Visual Document Retrievalcited by 6
- 2025Hybrid-Vector Retrieval for Visually Rich Documents: Combining Single-Vector Efficiency and Multi-Vector Accuracycited by 4
- 2026Beyond the Grid: Layout-Informed Multi-Vector Retrieval with Parsed Visual Document Representationscited by 3
- 2026LEMUR: Learned Multi-Vector Retrievalcited by 1
- 2026AnchorFold: A Focus-Then-Fold Framework via Recursive Attention Propagation for Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrievalcited by 1
- 2026Spatial Matryoshka Training for Multi-Granularity Visual Document Retrievalcited by 0
- 2026EigenLI: Spectral Approximations to Late Interactioncited by 0
- 2026MAGIC: Marginal-Guided Compression with Optimal Transport for Efficient Visual Document Retrievalcited by 0
- 2026AdaMerge: Tuning-Free Patch Compression for Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrievalcited by 0
- 2026AdaMerge: Tuning-Free Patch Compression for Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval18 Sep 2026
- 2026MAGIC: Marginal-Guided Compression with Optimal Transport for Efficient Visual Document Retrieval17 Sep 2026
- 2026EigenLI: Spectral Approximations to Late Interaction7 Sep 2026
- 2026Spatial Matryoshka Training for Multi-Granularity Visual Document Retrieval30 Aug 2026
- 2026AnchorFold: A Focus-Then-Fold Framework via Recursive Attention Propagation for Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval9 Aug 2026
- 2026Visual Late Chunking: An Empirical Study of Contextual Chunking for Efficient Visual Document Retrieval11 Apr 2026
- 2026Beyond the Grid: Layout-Informed Multi-Vector Retrieval with Parsed Visual Document Representations2 Mar 2026
- 2026Unlocking Multimodal Document Intelligence: From Current Triumphs to Future Frontiers of Visual Document Retrieval23 Feb 2026
- 2026Sculpting the Vector Space: Towards Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Prune-then-Merge Framework23 Feb 2026
- 2026LEMUR: Learned Multi-Vector Retrieval29 Jan 2026
- 2025Hybrid-Vector Retrieval for Visually Rich Documents: Combining Single-Vector Efficiency and Multi-Vector Accuracy25 Oct 2025
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