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
Online vs. Offline Evaluation Techniques
Was this section helpful?
- Introduction to Information Retrieval, Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schütze, 2008 (Cambridge University Press) - A classic textbook covering fundamental concepts and metrics in information retrieval, including Precision, Recall, MAP, and NDCG, essential for understanding offline evaluation.
- Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing, Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang, Ya Xu, 2020 (Cambridge University Press) DOI: 10.1017/9781108608821 - A comprehensive guide to designing, running, and analyzing online controlled experiments (A/B tests), crucial for effective online evaluation in production systems.
- Evaluating Online Search Engines with Interleaving, Olivier Chapelle and Ya Zhang, 2009 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM '09) (ACM) DOI: 10.1145/1458082.1458091 - A foundational paper introducing interleaving, an efficient and sensitive method for online evaluation of search engines by combining results from different systems.