Latent Terms: Dense Retrievers Contain Trivially Extractable BM25-ready Zipfian Vocabularies

arXiv:2605.29384v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose Latent Terms, a method revealing that models trained for dense retrieval, whether single- or multi-vector, learn representations that can trivially be decomposed into retrieval-ready sparse features. When trained on frozen retrievers, Sparse Autoencoders without any retrieval-specific adjustments extract a latent vocabulary with approximately Zipfian collection statistics, directly suitable for classical sparse retrieval scoring via BM25. This approach enables sparse retrieval while requiring no learned expansion objective or sparse

Source: arXiv cs.AI — read the full report at the original publisher.

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