# Query-Side Distillation

The work introduces ColNanoVDR, which uses OTW, an entropic optimal-transport objective with learned token weights, to distill the query encoder of multi-vector visual document retrieval teachers into 149M text-only students without encoding or reading any page during training, retaining about 95% of the teachers' NDCG@5 on ViDoRe v1-v3, encoding queries up to 26x faster on a single CPU thread, and matching score distillation under identical training while reading 12.6x less cached teacher data.

The work introduces ColNanoVDR, which uses OTW, an entropic optimal-transport objective with learned token weights, to distill the query encoder of multi-vector visual document retrieval teachers into 149M text-only students without encoding or reading any page during training, retaining about 95% of the teachers' NDCG@5 on ViDoRe v1-v3, encoding queries up to 26x faster on a single CPU thread, and matching score distillation under identical training while reading 12.6x less cached teacher data.