Benchmarking Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Algorithms on Transformer-based Embedding Vectors

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Iff, Patrick, Bruegger, Paul, Chrapek, Marcin, Kochergin, David, Besta, Maciej, Hoefler, Torsten
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Iff, Patrick
Bruegger, Paul
Chrapek, Marcin
Kochergin, David
Besta, Maciej
Hoefler, Torsten
author_facet Iff, Patrick
Bruegger, Paul
Chrapek, Marcin
Kochergin, David
Besta, Maciej
Hoefler, Torsten
contents Advances in embedding models for text, image, audio, and video drive progress across multiple domains, including retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation systems, and others. Many of these applications require an efficient method to retrieve items that are close to a given query in the embedding space while satisfying a filter condition based on the item's attributes, a problem known as filtered approximate nearest neighbor search (FANNS). By performing an in-depth literature analysis on FANNS, we identify a key gap in the research landscape: publicly available datasets with embedding vectors from state-of-the-art transformer-based text embedding models that contain abundant real-world attributes covering a broad spectrum of attribute types and value distributions. To fill this gap, we introduce the arxiv-for-fanns dataset of transformer-based embedding vectors for the abstracts of over 2.7 million arXiv papers, enriched with 11 real-world attributes such as authors and categories. We benchmark eleven different FANNS methods on our new dataset to evaluate their performance across different filter types, numbers of retrieved neighbors, dataset scales, and query selectivities. We distill our findings into eight key observations that guide users in selecting the most suitable FANNS method for their specific use cases.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_21989
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Algorithms on Transformer-based Embedding Vectors
Iff, Patrick
Bruegger, Paul
Chrapek, Marcin
Kochergin, David
Besta, Maciej
Hoefler, Torsten
Databases
Data Structures and Algorithms
Information Retrieval
Advances in embedding models for text, image, audio, and video drive progress across multiple domains, including retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation systems, and others. Many of these applications require an efficient method to retrieve items that are close to a given query in the embedding space while satisfying a filter condition based on the item's attributes, a problem known as filtered approximate nearest neighbor search (FANNS). By performing an in-depth literature analysis on FANNS, we identify a key gap in the research landscape: publicly available datasets with embedding vectors from state-of-the-art transformer-based text embedding models that contain abundant real-world attributes covering a broad spectrum of attribute types and value distributions. To fill this gap, we introduce the arxiv-for-fanns dataset of transformer-based embedding vectors for the abstracts of over 2.7 million arXiv papers, enriched with 11 real-world attributes such as authors and categories. We benchmark eleven different FANNS methods on our new dataset to evaluate their performance across different filter types, numbers of retrieved neighbors, dataset scales, and query selectivities. We distill our findings into eight key observations that guide users in selecting the most suitable FANNS method for their specific use cases.
title Benchmarking Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Algorithms on Transformer-based Embedding Vectors
topic Databases
Data Structures and Algorithms
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21989