ColBERT (Late Interaction Retrieval) — AI Glossary

ColBERT is a retrieval architecture that sits between bi-encoders and cross-encoders. Instead of encoding a document into a single vector, it produces one contextual embedding per token; relevance against a query is then computed as the sum over query tokens of the maximum similarity between that query token and any document token — the so-called late-interaction or MaxSim operation.