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
Integrating Keyword Search (BM25, TF-IDF)
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- Introduction to Information Retrieval, Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schütze, 2008 (Cambridge University Press) - A comprehensive textbook explaining TF-IDF, BM25, and other foundational information retrieval algorithms.
- Okapi at TREC-3, Stephen E. Robertson, Steve Walker, Susan Jones, Micheline Hancock-Beaulieu, Mike Gatford, 1994 Proceedings of The Third Text REtrieval Conference, TREC 1994, Vol. NIST Special Publication 500-226 (National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) - The original work demonstrating the effectiveness of the Okapi BM25 ranking function in information retrieval.
- Fusing IR Systems using Rank Aggregation, William W. Cohen, Einat Minkov, and Alon Kornblith, 2007 Proceedings of the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '07) (ACM) DOI: 10.1145/1277741.1277855 - Discusses strategies for combining results from multiple search systems using rank aggregation techniques, relevant to hybrid search result fusion.
- Lucene's Practical Scoring Function, The Apache Lucene Project, 2023 - Explains the practical implementation of BM25 and other scoring functions in Apache Lucene (version 9.9.2), including parameter details.