  The generative retrieval model depends solely on the information encoded in
its model parameters without external memory, its information capacity is
limited and fixed. To overcome the limitation, we propose Nonparametric
Decoding (Np Decoding) which can be applied to existing generative retrieval
models. Np Decoding uses nonparametric contextualized vocab embeddings
(external memory) rather than vanilla vocab embeddings as decoder vocab
embeddings. By leveraging the contextualized vocab embeddings, the generative
retrieval model is able to utilize both the parametric and nonparametric space.
Evaluation over 9 datasets (8 single-hop and 1 multi-hop) in the document
retrieval task shows that applying Np Decoding to generative retrieval models
significantly improves the performance. We also show that Np Decoding is data-
and parameter-efficient, and shows high performance in the zero-shot setting.
