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Semantic Certainty Assessment in Vector Retrieval Systems: A Novel Framework for Embedding Quality Evaluation

Information Retrieval 2025-07-09 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

Vector retrieval systems exhibit significant performance variance across queries due to heterogeneous embedding quality. We propose a lightweight framework for predicting retrieval performance at the query level by combining quantization robustness and neighborhood density metrics. Our approach is motivated by the observation that high-quality embeddings occupy geometrically stable regions in the embedding space and exhibit consistent neighborhood structures. We evaluate our method on 4 standard retrieval datasets, showing consistent improvements of 9.4±\pm1.2\% in Recall@10 over competitive baselines. The framework requires minimal computational overhead (less than 5\% of retrieval time) and enables adaptive retrieval strategies. Our analysis reveals systematic patterns in embedding quality across different query types, providing insights for targeted training data augmentation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.05933,
  title  = {Semantic Certainty Assessment in Vector Retrieval Systems: A Novel Framework for Embedding Quality Evaluation},
  author = {Y. Du},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.05933},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

7 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:51:17.897Z