Computed, not Memorized: Bit-Factorized Identifiers for Efficient Generative Retrieval

Abstract

Generative retrieval is known for its efficient end-to-end indexing and retrieval. In particular, numeric Document Identifiers (DocIDs) are generally more efficient because they are shorter and generally fixed-length sequences over a small vocabulary, requiring fewer decoding steps during beam search. However, they tend to generalize poorly to unseen documents and must be learned during indexing-stage training. In this paper, we propose a numeric DocID design for generative retrieval that enables better adaptation to unseen documents without retraining. Our DocID design inherits the language model's knowledge: each DocID is a sequence of tokens factorized into bits, and each token is scored as the sum of its bits. Unlike existing numeric DocIDs, whose tokens carry meaning only through embeddings memorized during indexing training, each bit here derives its meaning from the model's representation. Therefore, the DocIDs of unseen documents remain scorable without retraining. Experiments on three benchmarks show that our DocID design substantially improves unseen-document retrieval while maintaining comparable performance on seen documents. It achieves over 20 percentage points higher Hit@10 on unseen documents and up to 7 times lower inference latency than existing numeric DocID designs on NQ320K and TriviaQA, while performing only 3 percentage points below weight-update methods on MS MARCO without additional training. These results show that an appropriate DocID design can heavily reduce retraining costs when adapting generative retrievers to new documents.