No Arabic abstract
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.
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.
Approximate nearest neighbor algorithms are used to speed up nearest neighbor search in a wide array of applications. However, current indexing methods feature several hyperparameters that need to be tuned to reach an acceptable accuracy--speed trade-off. A grid search in the parameter space is often impractically slow due to a time-consuming index-building procedure. Therefore, we propose an algorithm for automatically tuning the hyperparameters of indexing methods based on randomized space-partitioning trees. In particular, we present results using randomized k-d trees, random projection trees and randomized PCA trees. The tuning algorithm adds minimal overhead to the index-building process but is able to find the optimal hyperparameters accurately. We demonstrate that the algorithm is significantly faster than existing approaches, and that the indexing methods used are competitive with the state-of-the-art methods in query time while being faster to build.
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.
We formulate approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search as a multi-label classification task. The implications are twofold. First, tree-based indexes can be searched more efficiently by interpreting them as models to solve this task. Second, in addition to index structures designed specifically for ANN search, any type of classifier can be used as an index.