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
Product Quantization (PQ) Mechanics
New · Open Source
Kerb - LLM Development Toolkit
Python toolkit for building production-ready LLM applications. Modular utilities for prompts, RAG, agents, structured outputs, and multi-provider support.
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- Product Quantization for Nearest Neighbor Search, Hervé Jégou, Matthijs Douze, Cordelia Schmid, 2011 IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 33 (IEEE Computer Society) DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2010.57 - The foundational research paper that introduced Product Quantization, detailing its core principles, vector decomposition, codebook generation, and approximate distance computation methods.
- Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs, Jeff Johnson, Matthijs Douze, Hervé Jégou, 2017 arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.08734 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1702.08734 - Describes the FAISS library, a highly optimized open-source tool that widely implements Product Quantization and its variants for efficient large-scale similarity search, providing practical context and implementation details.
- Vector Embeddings, Kian Kulkarni and Kumar Praveen, 2024 (Packt Publishing) - A contemporary textbook providing a comprehensive overview of vector embeddings, approximate nearest neighbor search, and related algorithms like Product Quantization, highly relevant for LLM applications.
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