Trove: A Flexible Toolkit for Dense Retrieval

Reza Esfandiarpoor, Max Zuo, Stephen Bach


Abstract
We introduce Trove, an easy-to-use open-source retrieval toolkit that simplifies research experiments without sacrificing flexibility or speed. For the first time, we introduce efficient data management features that load and process (filter, select, transform, and combine) retrieval datasets on the fly, with just a few lines of code. This gives users the flexibility to easily experiment with different dataset configurations without the need to compute and store multiple copies of large datasets. Trove is highly customizable: in addition to many built-in options, it allows users to freely modify existing components or replace them entirely with user-defined objects. It also provides a low-code and unified pipeline for evaluation and hard negative mining, which supports multi-node execution without any code changes. Trove’s data management features reduce memory consumption by a factor of 2.6. Moreover, Trove’s easy-to-use inference pipeline incurs no overhead, and inference times decrease linearly with the number of available nodes. Most importantly, we demonstrate how Trove simplifies retrieval experiments and allows for arbitrary customizations, thus facilitating exploratory research.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-demo.25
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Marocco
Editors:
Danilo Croce, Jochen Leidner, Nafise Sadat Moosavi
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
349–358
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-demo.25/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Reza Esfandiarpoor, Max Zuo, and Stephen Bach. 2026. Trove: A Flexible Toolkit for Dense Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations), pages 349–358, Rabat, Marocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Trove: A Flexible Toolkit for Dense Retrieval (Esfandiarpoor et al., EACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-demo.25.pdf