Dual encoder retrieval efficiency with parameter sharing in projection layer

Abstract

Aspects of the technology provide systems and methods for implementing an asymmetric dual encoder architecture. The architecture includes a token embedder layer section having a first token embedding section associated with a first input and a second token embedding section associated with a second input, and an encoder layer section having a first encoder section receiving token embeddings from the first token embedding section and a second encoder section receiving token embeddings from the second token embedding section. A shared projection layer receives encodings from both the first and second encoder sections and generates a set of projections. An embedding space is configured, based on the set of projections, to generate a question embedding and an answer embedding, in which the question and answer embeddings are used in identifying a set of candidate answers to an input answer.