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
Debugging Search Relevance Issues
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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- Introduction to Information Retrieval, Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schütze, 2008 (Cambridge University Press) - A comprehensive textbook providing foundational knowledge of information retrieval, including evaluation metrics like NDCG and MRR, and the qualitative assessment of search relevance.
- Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering, Vladimir Karpukhin, Barlas Oğuz, Sewon Min, Patrick Lewis, Ledell Wu, Sergey Edunov, Danqi Chen, Wen-tau Yih, 2020 EMNLP 2020 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2004.04906 - Introduces a significant dense retrieval model, highlighting the importance of high-quality embeddings and effective training strategies for semantic search, which directly impacts relevance debugging.
- Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks, Nils Reimers and Iryna Gurevych, 2019 EMNLP DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1908.10084 - Presents methods for generating semantically meaningful sentence embeddings, offering insights into how embedding quality and fine-tuning influence relevance in vector search systems.
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