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arXiv · 2608.08732

AnchorFold: A Focus-Then-Fold Framework via Recursive Attention Propagation for Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval

Abstract

Multi-vector vision-language retrievers enable fine-grained Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) through late interaction, but storing and scoring hundreds of visual patch embeddings per page incurs substantial overhead. Existing training-free methods rely on pruning or merging: pruning degrades sharply under aggressive compression, whereas merging does not explicitly prioritize important regions when forming representatives. We introduce AnchorFold, a training-free focus-then-fold framework for document-side index compression. AnchorFold applies Recursive Attention Propagation over visual self-attention graphs, performing multi-step propagation within each attention head and integrating scores across heads and layers. The focus stage selects the highest-centrality tokens as anchors. The fold stage assigns remaining tokens to their most similar anchors in the normalized retrieval space and summarizes each anchor-centered group through centrality-weighted aggregation. This preserves non-anchor contributions while concentrating capacity on structurally important tokens. Across ViDoRe v1/v2 and REAL-MM-RAG with three diverse retrieval backbones, AnchorFold consistently outperforms all evaluated training-free baselines at $γ\leq 0.20$. On ViDoRe v1/v2, it retains 98.3% of full-index NDCG@5 on average at $5\times$ compression, achieving near-lossless compression, and 92.4% at $20\times$ compression.

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BibTeXRIS

Haoyu Zuo, Yibo Yan, Xin Zou, Shuliang Liu, Yi Cao, Mingdong Ou, Xuming Hu. 2026-08-09. AnchorFold: A Focus-Then-Fold Framework via Recursive Attention Propagation for Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08732

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