TurboQuant: Online Vector Quantization with Near-optimal Distortion Rate

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Hauptverfasser: Zandieh, Amir, Daliri, Majid, Hadian, Majid, Mirrokni, Vahab
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zandieh, Amir
Daliri, Majid
Hadian, Majid
Mirrokni, Vahab
author_facet Zandieh, Amir
Daliri, Majid
Hadian, Majid
Mirrokni, Vahab
contents Vector quantization, a problem rooted in Shannon's source coding theory, aims to quantize high-dimensional Euclidean vectors while minimizing distortion in their geometric structure. We propose TurboQuant to address both mean-squared error (MSE) and inner product distortion, overcoming limitations of existing methods that fail to achieve optimal distortion rates. Our data-oblivious algorithms, suitable for online applications, achieve near-optimal distortion rates (within a small constant factor) across all bit-widths and dimensions. TurboQuant achieves this by randomly rotating input vectors, inducing a concentrated Beta distribution on coordinates, and leveraging the near-independence property of distinct coordinates in high dimensions to simply apply optimal scalar quantizers per each coordinate. Recognizing that MSE-optimal quantizers introduce bias in inner product estimation, we propose a two-stage approach: applying an MSE quantizer followed by a 1-bit Quantized JL (QJL) transform on the residual, resulting in an unbiased inner product quantizer. We also provide a formal proof of the information-theoretic lower bounds on best achievable distortion rate by any vector quantizer, demonstrating that TurboQuant closely matches these bounds, differing only by a small constant ($\approx 2.7$) factor. Experimental results validate our theoretical findings, showing that for KV cache quantization, we achieve absolute quality neutrality with 3.5 bits per channel and marginal quality degradation with 2.5 bits per channel. Furthermore, in nearest neighbor search tasks, our method outperforms existing product quantization techniques in recall while reducing indexing time to virtually zero.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_19874
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TurboQuant: Online Vector Quantization with Near-optimal Distortion Rate
Zandieh, Amir
Daliri, Majid
Hadian, Majid
Mirrokni, Vahab
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
Data Structures and Algorithms
Vector quantization, a problem rooted in Shannon's source coding theory, aims to quantize high-dimensional Euclidean vectors while minimizing distortion in their geometric structure. We propose TurboQuant to address both mean-squared error (MSE) and inner product distortion, overcoming limitations of existing methods that fail to achieve optimal distortion rates. Our data-oblivious algorithms, suitable for online applications, achieve near-optimal distortion rates (within a small constant factor) across all bit-widths and dimensions. TurboQuant achieves this by randomly rotating input vectors, inducing a concentrated Beta distribution on coordinates, and leveraging the near-independence property of distinct coordinates in high dimensions to simply apply optimal scalar quantizers per each coordinate. Recognizing that MSE-optimal quantizers introduce bias in inner product estimation, we propose a two-stage approach: applying an MSE quantizer followed by a 1-bit Quantized JL (QJL) transform on the residual, resulting in an unbiased inner product quantizer. We also provide a formal proof of the information-theoretic lower bounds on best achievable distortion rate by any vector quantizer, demonstrating that TurboQuant closely matches these bounds, differing only by a small constant ($\approx 2.7$) factor. Experimental results validate our theoretical findings, showing that for KV cache quantization, we achieve absolute quality neutrality with 3.5 bits per channel and marginal quality degradation with 2.5 bits per channel. Furthermore, in nearest neighbor search tasks, our method outperforms existing product quantization techniques in recall while reducing indexing time to virtually zero.
title TurboQuant: Online Vector Quantization with Near-optimal Distortion Rate
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19874