README.md

🔍 NSIO: Neural Search Indexing Optimization: Integrating Augmentation and PEFT for Efficient Retrieval

Copyright © 2025 Alessio Borgi, Eugenio Bugli, Damiano Imola

📌 Overview

This repository provides an optimized implementation of Differentiable Search Indexing (DSI), integrating data augmentation techniques and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods to improve retrieval accuracy and computational efficiency.

✅ Contributions

Data Augmentation Techniques:

• Num2Word Transformation: Converts numerical values into their word equivalents.
• Stopword Removal: Eliminates redundant tokens to improve semantic representation.
• POS-MLM Augmentation: Combines part-of-speech tagging with masked language modeling to enhance context understanding.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) Methods:

• LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation for lightweight fine-tuning.
• QLoRA: 4-bit quantization with LoRA for memory efficiency.
• AdaLoRA: Adaptive LoRA that dynamically adjusts rank.
• ConvLoRA (LoCon): LoRA extended with depthwise convolution for local feature modeling.

🚀 Our approach enables faster fine-tuning, reduced memory consumption, and enhanced retrieval performance for large-scale search indexing tasks.