SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2606.26439

TileMaxSim: IO-Aware GPU MaxSim Scoring with Dimension Tiling and Fused Product Quantization

Abstract

Multi-vector retrieval models such as ColBERT achieve state-of-the-art accuracy through fine-grained token-level MaxSim scoring, yet existing GPU implementations leave most hardware performance unused. We give a roofline analysis of MaxSim on modern GPUs and identify a severe bandwidth gap: naive implementations reach only 5-18% of peak HBM bandwidth because they materialize the Nq x Nd similarity matrix, wasting memory traffic on data that is consumed once and discarded. We present TileMaxSim, a family of IO-aware Triton kernels that close this gap via (1) multi-query SRAM tiling that streams document embeddings through shared memory while accumulating per-query-token maxima in registers, reading each embedding from HBM exactly once; (2) dimension tiling that partitions the embedding dimension into 128-wide chunks, enabling scoring for d > 128 embeddings that overflow shared memory; and (3) fused product-quantization scoring via shared-memory lookup tables, cutting HBM I/O by up to ~31x. On NVIDIA H100 GPUs, TileMaxSim reaches 80.2% of peak HBM bandwidth and scores 82M documents/second (71.6M/s on real MS MARCO passages), a 220x speedup over loop-based scoring, 6.5x over fused PyTorch, 6.6-8.5x over torch.compile, and 469x the scoring throughput of WARP's CPU engine on the same node. TileMaxSim preserves exact retrieval quality: on MS MARCO and three BEIR benchmarks, rankings match reference MaxSim. As a drop-in replacement in ColBERTv2/PLAID, it cuts scoring latency at 100K candidates from 268 ms to 1.2 ms (98% lower end-to-end latency). We further show constant throughput from 100K to 500K documents, data-parallel multi-GPU sharding, robustness across dimensions 64-768, and FP16/BF16/FP32 support. Concurrent work independently develops an IO-aware fused MaxSim kernel; we differ in dimension tiling for d > 128 and fused product-quantization scoring.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Ashutosh Sharma. 2026-06-24. TileMaxSim: IO-Aware GPU MaxSim Scoring with Dimension Tiling and Fused Product Quantization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26439

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

UniRec: Cross-stage Multi-Task Fusion with Preference Alignment for Cascaded Recommender Systems

Industrial recommender systems use cascaded stages with different objectives, feature spaces, and latency constraints. Optimizing pre-ranking and ranking separately can create cross-stage inconsistency: upstream models may filter out items preferred by downstream rankers, and independently tuned downstream fusion can offset upstream improvements. Existing multi-task fusion methods focus on multi-objective fusion within the ranking stage, and cross-stage methods typically only add a downstream score factor to upstream ranking. Joint optimization of fusion modules across both stages remains largely unexplored. We propose UniRec, a Unified Cross-stage Recommendation Fusion model. First, the two fusion agents partially share input embeddings and are trained in a single computation graph, so gradients from either stage propagate through the shared representation and influence the other. Second, we introduce a dual-axis preference alignment objective: a vertical cross-stage consistency term transfers downstream pairwise preferences to the upstream fusion score, and a horizontal compact aggregation term reorganizes dozens of pairwise objectives over heterogeneous prior signals into bidirectional preference evidence. Third, we find that unconstrained end-to-end fusion optimization can exploit imbalances in item attribute distributions, over-concentrating on high-reward regions at the cost of other objectives. We therefore add an attribute group-relative regularization that computes advantages within attribute groups and normalizes the policy over the same groups, so uniformly promoting an entire high-reward group yields no optimization gain. Offline, UniRec consistently outperforms single-stage fusion and cross-stage coordination baselines. Online A/B tests show a 0.616\% gain in app usage duration. UniRec is fully deployed on the Kuaishou platform.

cs.IR

VikingRAG: Accurate and Token-efficient Retrieval-augmented Generation over Structured Documents

State-of-the-art retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods exploit document structures to acquire sufficient evidence, but often incur substantial token costs. To reduce structural-context tokens without compromising high RAG accuracy, we present {\sf VikingRAG}, a directory-aware semantic data management system that tightly integrates semantic and structural access to support structural-context-efficient, evidence-gap-driven multi-round retrieval. To further reduce token overhead of multi-round interaction, we materialize agentic multi-round retrieval traces as experience edges, and reuse these edges for similar queries, avoiding repeated multi-round exploration. To additionally reduce token costs when agentic multi-round retrieval is unnecessary, we introduce an adaptive escalation strategy that answers from one-round experience-augmented retrieval when the evidence is sufficient, and invokes agentic multi-round retrieval only otherwise. Experiments on real datasets show that the base system {\sf VikingRAG} matches high accuracy of state-of-the-art methods while consuming only 11.6\%--51.9\% of their tokens. With retrieval-trace reuse and adaptive escalation, token costs drop to 5.1\%--32.5\% while maintaining competitive accuracy and practical document-storage performance, showing the utility of this work for emerging AI knowledge bases.

cs.IR

TimelyRAG: Semantic-Temporal Hybrid Retrieval for Time-Critical Question Answering in Overlapping-Evolving Documents

Although large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have advanced open-domain question answering (QA), they remain unreliable when documents evolve through amendments. Existing time-sensitive retrieval methods address only the disjoint-evolving environment, where each update is an independent snapshot. However, laws, policies, and regulations often operate in overlapping-evolving environments, where amendments override earlier clauses while preserving most content, creating strong semantic overlap across versions. We propose TimelyRAG, a retriever-agnostic framework that incorporates temporal distance into ranking to align queries with version-appropriate documents. We also introduce TimelyQABench, the first benchmark for regulation-heavy domains with overlapping-evolving challenges. Experiments show consistent gains, up to +28.6% in nDCG@10, highlighting the importance of temporal reasoning for reliable QA over evolving documents. All resources are available at https://github.com/kaist-dmlab/TimelyRAG.

cs.IR