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Related papers: Relevance Filtering for Embedding-based Retrieval

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Filtered ANN search is an increasingly important problem in vector retrieval, yet systems face a difficult trade-off due to the execution order: Pre-filtering (filtering first, then ANN over the passing subset) requires expensive…

Databases · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Zhuocheng Gan , Yifan Wang

Sparse embeddings of data form an attractive class due to their inherent interpretability: Every dimension is tied to a term in some vocabulary, making it easy to visually decipher the latent space. Sparsity, however, poses unique…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Sebastian Bruch , Franco Maria Nardini , Cosimo Rulli , Rossano Venturini

Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) is widely adopted for approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) for its ability to deliver high recall with low latency on large-scale, high-dimensional embeddings. The exploration factor, commonly…

Databases · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Chao Zhang , Renée J. Miller

Exact nearest neighbor search is a computationally intensive process, and even its simpler sibling -- vector retrieval -- can be computationally complex. This is exacerbated when retrieving vectors which have high-dimension $d$ relative to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Richard Zhu

Learned sparse representations form an attractive class of contextual embeddings for text retrieval. That is so because they are effective models of relevance and are interpretable by design. Despite their apparent compatibility with…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Sebastian Bruch , Franco Maria Nardini , Cosimo Rulli , Rossano Venturini

Learning a high-dimensional dense representation for vocabulary terms, also known as a word embedding, has recently attracted much attention in natural language processing and information retrieval tasks. The embedding vectors are typically…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2017-07-18 Hamed Zamani , W. Bruce Croft

Dense retrieval systems conduct first-stage retrieval using embedded representations and simple similarity metrics to match a query to documents. Its effectiveness depends on encoded embeddings to capture the semantics of queries and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-09-01 HongChien Yu , Chenyan Xiong , Jamie Callan

Dense retrieval, which encodes queries and documents into a single dense vector, has become the dominant neural retrieval approach due to its simplicity and compatibility with fast approximate nearest neighbor algorithms. As the tasks dense…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Julian Killingback , Mahta Rafiee , Madine Manas , Hamed Zamani

Retrieving the most similar objects in a large-scale database for a given query is a fundamental building block in many application domains, ranging from web searches, visual, cross media, and document retrievals. State-of-the-art…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-15 Muge Li , Liangyue Li , Feiping Nie

Alphanumeric identifiers such as manufacturer part numbers (MPNs), SKUs, and model codes are ubiquitous in e-commerce catalogs and search. These identifiers are sparse, non linguistic, and highly sensitive to tokenization and typographical…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Samarth Agrawal , Jayanth Yetukuri , Diptesh Kanojia , Qunzhi Zhou , Zhe Wu

We propose a generic feature compression method for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) problems, which speeds up existing ANNS methods in a plug-and-play manner. Specifically, based on transformer, we propose a new network structure…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Haokui Zhang , Buzhou Tang , Wenze Hu , Xiaoyu Wang

Pairing a lexical retriever with a neural re-ranking model has set state-of-the-art performance on large-scale information retrieval datasets. This pipeline covers scenarios like question answering or navigational queries, however, for…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Tim Baumgärtner , Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro , Nils Reimers , Iryna Gurevych

Nearest Neighbor Search (NNS) is a fundamental problem in data structures with wide-ranging applications, such as web search, recommendation systems, and, more recently, retrieval-augmented generations (RAG). In such recent applications, in…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Siddharth Barman , Nirjhar Das , Shivam Gupta , Kirankumar Shiragur

In a number of information retrieval applications (e.g., patent search, literature review, due diligence, etc.), preventing false negatives is more important than preventing false positives. However, approaches designed to reduce review…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Timo Kats , Peter van der Putten , Jan Scholtes

Fast k-Nearest Neighbor search over real-valued vector spaces (KNN) is an important algorithmic task for information retrieval and recommendation systems. We present a method for using reduced precision to represent vectors through…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Anthony Ko , Iman Keivanloo , Vihan Lakshman , Eric Schkufza

Conducting text retrieval in a dense learned representation space has many intriguing advantages over sparse retrieval. Yet the effectiveness of dense retrieval (DR) often requires combination with sparse retrieval. In this paper, we…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Lee Xiong , Chenyan Xiong , Ye Li , Kwok-Fung Tang , Jialin Liu , Paul Bennett , Junaid Ahmed , Arnold Overwijk

Late-interaction retrieval models like ColBERT achieve superior accuracy by enabling token-level interactions, but their computational cost hinders scalability and integration with Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS). We introduce…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Ramnath Kumar , Prateek Jain , Cho-Jui Hsieh

E-commerce recommendation and search commonly rely on sparse keyword matching (e.g., BM25), which breaks down under vocabulary mismatch when user intent has limited lexical overlap with product metadata. We cast content-based recommendation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mritunjay Pandey

Vector databases typically rely on approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search to retrieve the top-k closest vectors to a query in embedding space. While effective, this approach often yields semantically redundant results, missing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Rahul Raja , Arpita Vats

Embedding index that enables fast approximate nearest neighbor(ANN) search, serves as an indispensable component for state-of-the-art deep retrieval systems. Traditional approaches, often separating the two steps of embedding learning and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Han Zhang , Hongwei Shen , Yiming Qiu , Yunjiang Jiang , Songlin Wang , Sulong Xu , Yun Xiao , Bo Long , Wen-Yun Yang