Papers for

ecommerce product search teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

RaBitQ-SSD improves SSD-based vector search speed and efficiency

RaBitQ-SSD: Split Codes and Pipelined I/O for SSD-Resident Vector Search

Abstract: SSD-resident approximate nearest-neighbor search is essential when vector collections exceed DRAM capacity. The challenge is to reduce SSD reads and hide I/O latency through concurrent reads and overlap with computation. However, for graph-based search, progressive candidate discovery limits advance I/O planning while IVF search reads inverted lists in full, incurring unnecessary SSD reads. In this paper, we present RaBitQ-SSD, an extension of IVF-RaBitQ for SSD-resident vector search. Specifically, we propose Split-RaBitQ, which retains a configurable prefix of each binary code in DRAM, allowing in-memory code storage below one bit per dimension. Using this partial representation, it provides an unbiased distance estimator with a probabilistic error bound. Once the in-memory coarse quantizer identifies candidate lists, this bound supports pruning individual candidates within them, enabling finer-grained SSD access. We also design an asynchronous search pipeline that coordinates candidate pruning with SSD read scheduling to reduce unnecessary reads while overlapping I/O with computation. On datasets ranging from $5$ million to $1$ billion vectors, RaBitQ-SSD delivers up to $1.74\times$ the throughput of graph-based baselines at $90\%$ recall, while reducing SSD page reads by up to $3.8\times$. Its on-SSD indexes are up to $7.0\times$ smaller and $10.0\times$ faster to build than DiskANN. We also build and search an index of $10$ billion vectors on a single machine with one SSD, achieving over $3{,}000$ queries per second at $90\%$ recall.

Fri 2 OctDatabases
The gist
Searching for similar items in huge collections stored on SSDs is slow because reading from SSDs takes time. The authors propose RaBitQ-SSD, which keeps small summaries of data in memory to guess distances quickly and decide which data to read from the SSD. This approach reduces unnecessary reads and overlaps computing with reading, making searches faster and more efficient. They tested it on collections up to 10 billion items and found it was faster and used less space than previous methods.
Open → 2610.02652v1