HAKES: Scalable Vector Database for Embedding Search Service

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hu, Guoyu, Cai, Shaofeng, Dinh, Tien Tuan Anh, Xie, Zhongle, Yue, Cong, Chen, Gang, Ooi, Beng Chin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hu, Guoyu
Cai, Shaofeng
Dinh, Tien Tuan Anh
Xie, Zhongle
Yue, Cong
Chen, Gang
Ooi, Beng Chin
author_facet Hu, Guoyu
Cai, Shaofeng
Dinh, Tien Tuan Anh
Xie, Zhongle
Yue, Cong
Chen, Gang
Ooi, Beng Chin
contents Modern deep learning models capture the semantics of complex data by transforming them into high-dimensional embedding vectors. Emerging applications, such as retrieval-augmented generation, use approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search in the embedding vector space to find similar data. Existing vector databases provide indexes for efficient ANN searches, with graph-based indexes being the most popular due to their low latency and high recall in real-world high-dimensional datasets. However, these indexes are costly to build, suffer from significant contention under concurrent read-write workloads, and scale poorly to multiple servers. Our goal is to build a vector database that achieves high throughput and high recall under concurrent read-write workloads. To this end, we first propose an ANN index with an explicit two-stage design combining a fast filter stage with highly compressed vectors and a refine stage to ensure recall, and we devise a novel lightweight machine learning technique to fine-tune the index parameters. We introduce an early termination check to dynamically adapt the search process for each query. Next, we add support for writes while maintaining search performance by decoupling the management of the learned parameters. Finally, we design HAKES, a distributed vector database that serves the new index in a disaggregated architecture. We evaluate our index and system against 12 state-of-the-art indexes and three distributed vector databases, using high-dimensional embedding datasets generated by deep learning models. The experimental results show that our index outperforms index baselines in the high recall region and under concurrent read-write workloads. Furthermore, \namesys{} is scalable and achieves up to $16\times$ higher throughputs than the baselines. The HAKES project is open-sourced at https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~dbsystem/hakes/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12524
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HAKES: Scalable Vector Database for Embedding Search Service
Hu, Guoyu
Cai, Shaofeng
Dinh, Tien Tuan Anh
Xie, Zhongle
Yue, Cong
Chen, Gang
Ooi, Beng Chin
Databases
Machine Learning
Modern deep learning models capture the semantics of complex data by transforming them into high-dimensional embedding vectors. Emerging applications, such as retrieval-augmented generation, use approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search in the embedding vector space to find similar data. Existing vector databases provide indexes for efficient ANN searches, with graph-based indexes being the most popular due to their low latency and high recall in real-world high-dimensional datasets. However, these indexes are costly to build, suffer from significant contention under concurrent read-write workloads, and scale poorly to multiple servers. Our goal is to build a vector database that achieves high throughput and high recall under concurrent read-write workloads. To this end, we first propose an ANN index with an explicit two-stage design combining a fast filter stage with highly compressed vectors and a refine stage to ensure recall, and we devise a novel lightweight machine learning technique to fine-tune the index parameters. We introduce an early termination check to dynamically adapt the search process for each query. Next, we add support for writes while maintaining search performance by decoupling the management of the learned parameters. Finally, we design HAKES, a distributed vector database that serves the new index in a disaggregated architecture. We evaluate our index and system against 12 state-of-the-art indexes and three distributed vector databases, using high-dimensional embedding datasets generated by deep learning models. The experimental results show that our index outperforms index baselines in the high recall region and under concurrent read-write workloads. Furthermore, \namesys{} is scalable and achieves up to $16\times$ higher throughputs than the baselines. The HAKES project is open-sourced at https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~dbsystem/hakes/.
title HAKES: Scalable Vector Database for Embedding Search Service
topic Databases
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12524