No Arabic abstract
Quantization methods have been introduced to perform large scale approximate nearest search tasks. Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) is one of the effective quantization methods. RVQ uses a multi-stage codebook learning scheme to lower the quantization error stage by stage. However, there are two major limitations for RVQ when applied to on high-dimensional approximate nearest neighbor search: 1. The performance gain diminishes quickly with added stages. 2. Encoding a vector with RVQ is actually NP-hard. In this paper, we propose an improved residual vector quantization (IRVQ) method, our IRVQ learns codebook with a hybrid method of subspace clustering and warm-started k-means on each stage to prevent performance gain from dropping, and uses a multi-path encoding scheme to encode a vector with lower distortion. Experimental results on the benchmark datasets show that our method gives substantially improves RVQ and delivers better performance compared to the state-of-the-art.
Vector quantization-based approaches are successful to solve Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) problems which are critical to many applications. The idea is to generate effective encodings to allow fast distance approximation. We propose quantization-based methods should partition the data space finely and exhibit locality of the dataset to allow efficient non-exhaustive search. In this paper, we introduce the concept of High Capacity Locality Aggregating Encodings (HCLAE) to this end, and propose Dictionary Annealing (DA) to learn HCLAE by a simulated annealing procedure. The quantization error is lower than other state-of-the-art. The algorithms of DA can be easily extended to an online learning scheme, allowing effective handle of large scale data. Further, we propose Aggregating-Tree (A-Tree), a non-exhaustive search method using HCLAE to perform efficient ANN-Search. A-Tree achieves magnitudes of speed-up on ANN-Search tasks, compared to the state-of-the-art.
We introduce a novel dictionary optimization method for high-dimensional vector quantization employed in approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search. Vector quantization methods first seek a series of dictionaries, then approximate each vector by a sum of elements selected from these dictionaries. An optimal series of dictionaries should be mutually independent, and each dictionary should generate a balanced encoding for the target dataset. Existing methods did not explicitly consider this. To achieve these goals along with minimizing the quantization error (residue), we propose a novel dictionary optimization method called emph{Dictionary Annealing} that alternatively heats up a single dictionary by generating an intermediate dataset with residual vectors, cools down the dictionary by fitting the intermediate dataset, then extracts the new residual vectors for the next iteration. Better codes can be learned by DA for the ANN search tasks. DA is easily implemented on GPU to utilize the latest computing technology, and can easily extended to an online dictionary learning scheme. We show by experiments that our optimized dictionaries substantially reduce the overall quantization error. Jointly used with residual vector quantization, our optimized dictionaries lead to a better approximate nearest neighbor search performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
High-dimensional Nearest Neighbor (NN) search is central in multimedia search systems. Product Quantization (PQ) is a widespread NN search technique which has a high performance and good scalability. PQ compresses high-dimensional vectors into compact codes thanks to a combination of quantizers. Large databases can, therefore, be stored entirely in RAM, enabling fast responses to NN queries. In almost all cases, PQ uses 8-bit quantizers as they offer low response times. In this paper, we advocate the use of 16-bit quantizers. Compared to 8-bit quantizers, 16-bit quantizers boost accuracy but they increase response time by a factor of 3 to 10. We propose a novel approach that allows 16-bit quantizers to offer the same response time as 8-bit quantizers, while still providing a boost of accuracy. Our approach builds on two key ideas: (i) the construction of derived codebooks that allow a fast and approximate distance evaluation, and (ii) a two-pass NN search procedure which builds a candidate set using the derived codebooks, and then refines it using 16-bit quantizers. On 1 billion SIFT vectors, with an inverted index, our approach offers a Recall@100 of 0.85 in 5.2 ms. By contrast, 16-bit quantizers alone offer a Recall@100 of 0.85 in 39 ms, and 8-bit quantizers a Recall@100 of 0.82 in 3.8 ms.
Approximate Nearest neighbor search (ANNS) is fundamental and essential operation in applications from many domains, such as databases, machine learning, multimedia, and computer vision. Although many algorithms have been continuously proposed in the literature in the above domains each year, there is no comprehensive evaluation and analysis of their performances. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of many state-of-the-art methods for approximate nearest neighbor search. Our study (1) is cross-disciplinary (i.e., including 16 algorithms in different domains, and from practitioners) and (2) has evaluated a diverse range of settings, including 20 datasets, several evaluation metrics, and different query workloads. The experimental results are carefully reported and analyzed to understand the performance results. Furthermore, we propose a new method that achieves both high query efficiency and high recall empirically on majority of the datasets under a wide range of settings.
We propose a generic feature compression method for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) problems, which speeds up existing ANNS methods in a plug-and-play manner. Specifically, we propose a new network structure called Compression Network with Transformer (CNT) to compress the feature into a low dimensional space, and an inhomogeneous neighborhood relationship preserving (INRP) loss that aims to maintain high search accuracy. In CNT, we use multiple compression projections to cast the feature into many low dimensional spaces, and then use transformer to globally optimize these projections such that the features are well compressed following the guidance from our loss function. The loss function is designed to assign high weights on point pairs that are close in original feature space, and keep their distances in projected space. Keeping these distances helps maintain the eventual top-k retrieval accuracy, and down weighting others creates room for feature compression. In experiments, we run our compression method on public datasets, and use the compressed features in graph based, product quantization and scalar quantization based ANNS solutions. Experimental results show that our compression method can significantly improve the efficiency of these methods while preserves or even improves search accuracy, suggesting its broad potential impact on real world applications.