Advanced Vector Search for LLM Applications
Chapter 1: Approximate Nearest Neighbor Algorithms
Revisiting Vector Embeddings and Search Fundamentals
Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSW) Internals
Inverted File Index (IVF) Variations
Product Quantization (PQ) Mechanics
Other Graph-Based ANN Methods (e.g., NSG, Vamana)
Selecting the Right ANN Algorithm: Trade-offs
Hands-on Practical: Implementing and Tuning HNSW
Chapter 2: Optimizing Vector Search Performance and Efficiency
Quantization Techniques: Scalar vs. Product
Implementing Optimized Product Quantization (OPQ)
Binary Hashing and Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) Refresher
Advanced Filtering Strategies: Pre vs. Post Filtering
Indexing Metadata Efficiently alongside Vectors
Hardware Acceleration Considerations (CPU SIMD, GPU)
Memory Management and Caching Strategies
Practice: Applying Quantization and Filtering
Chapter 3: Hybrid Search Approaches
Limitations of Pure Vector Search
Integrating Keyword Search (BM25, TF-IDF)
Result Fusion and Ranking Strategies
Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) and Other Fusion Algorithms
Graph-Based Augmentation for Vector Search
Multi-Modal Search Considerations
Hands-on Practical: Building a Hybrid Search Pipeline
Chapter 4: Scaling Vector Search for Production Systems
Distributed Vector Database Architectures
Sharding Strategies for Vector Indexes
Replication and High Availability
Load Balancing Search Queries
Monitoring Vector Search Performance Metrics
Index Updates and Maintenance in Production
Cost Optimization for Large-Scale Deployments
Practice: Configuring a Distributed Setup
Chapter 5: Advanced Tuning and Evaluation
Evaluation Metrics Revisited: Recall, Precision, Latency
Building Ground Truth Datasets for Evaluation
Parameter Sensitivity Analysis (HNSW, IVF)
A/B Testing Frameworks for Search Algorithms
Debugging Search Relevance Issues
Online vs. Offline Evaluation Techniques
Tuning for Specific Application Needs (RAG vs. Semantic Search)
Hands-on Practical: Comprehensive Performance Evaluation
Selecting the Right ANN Algorithm: Trade-offs
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- Efficient and Robust Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Using Hierarchical Navigable Small World Graphs, Yury Malkov, Dmitry Yashunin, 2018 IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 42 (IEEE Computer Society) DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2018.2889473 - Presents the Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) algorithm, detailing its structure, construction, and search process, which is a state-of-the-art method.
- Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs, Jeff Johnson, Matthijs Douze, Hervé Jégou, 2019 IEEE Transactions on Big Data, Vol. 7 (IEEE-Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.) DOI: 10.1109/TBDATA.2019.2921572 - Describes the Faiss library, providing efficient implementations of various ANN algorithms (including HNSW and IVF variants) and practical insights into their performance trade-offs.
- Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search: A Survey, Pengfei Zhang, Haonan Lu, Runzhe Zhao, Xiang Wang, Jiahui Zhang, Zhaoxin Zhang, Kai Zheng, 2023 ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 56 (Association for Computing Machinery) DOI: 10.1145/3606990 - A recent survey offering a broad overview and classification of approximate nearest neighbor search algorithms, covering various techniques and their comparative aspects.