IncDSI: Incrementally Updatable Document Retrieval
Varsha Kishore Chao Wan Justin Lovelace Yoav Artzi Kilian Q. Weinberger
Differentiable Search Index is a recently proposed paradigm for document
retrieval, that encodes information about a corpus of documents within the
parameters of a neural network and directly maps queries to corresponding
documents. These models have achieved state-of-the-art performances for
document retrieval across many benchmarks. These kinds of models have a
significant limitation: it is not easy to add new documents after a model is
trained. We propose IncDSI, a method to add documents in real time (about
20-50ms per document), without retraining the model on the entire dataset (or
even parts thereof). Instead we formulate the addition of documents as a
constrained optimization problem that makes minimal changes to the network
parameters. Although orders of magnitude faster, our approach is competitive
with re-training the model on the whole dataset and enables the development of
document retrieval systems that can be updated with new information in
real-time. Our code for IncDSI is available at
https://github.com/varshakishore/IncDSI.