AQR-HNSW: Accelerating Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search via Density-aware Quantization and Multi-stage Re-ranking

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Tewary, Ganap Ashit, Gantayat, Nrusinga Charan, Zhang, Jeff
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866908852093452288
author Tewary, Ganap Ashit
Gantayat, Nrusinga Charan
Zhang, Jeff
author_facet Tewary, Ganap Ashit
Gantayat, Nrusinga Charan
Zhang, Jeff
contents Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search has become fundamental to modern AI infrastructure, powering recommendation systems, search engines, and large language models across industry leaders from Google to OpenAI. Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graphs have emerged as the dominant ANN algorithm, widely adopted in production systems due to their superior recall versus latency balance. However, as vector databases scale to billions of embeddings, HNSW faces critical bottlenecks: memory consumption expands, distance computation overhead dominates query latency, and it suffers suboptimal performance on heterogeneous data distributions. This paper presents Adaptive Quantization and Rerank HNSW (AQR-HNSW), a novel framework that synergistically integrates three strategies to enhance HNSW scalability. AQR-HNSW introduces (1) density-aware adaptive quantization, achieving 4x compression while preserving distance relationships; (2) multi-state re-ranking that reduces unnecessary computations by 35%; and (3) quantization-optimized SIMD implementations delivering 16-64 operations per cycle across architectures. Evaluation on standard benchmarks demonstrates 2.5-3.3x higher queries per second (QPS) than state-of-the-art HNSW implementations while maintaining over 98% recall, with 75% memory reduction for the index graph and 5x faster index construction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_21600
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AQR-HNSW: Accelerating Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search via Density-aware Quantization and Multi-stage Re-ranking
Tewary, Ganap Ashit
Gantayat, Nrusinga Charan
Zhang, Jeff
Information Retrieval
Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search has become fundamental to modern AI infrastructure, powering recommendation systems, search engines, and large language models across industry leaders from Google to OpenAI. Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graphs have emerged as the dominant ANN algorithm, widely adopted in production systems due to their superior recall versus latency balance. However, as vector databases scale to billions of embeddings, HNSW faces critical bottlenecks: memory consumption expands, distance computation overhead dominates query latency, and it suffers suboptimal performance on heterogeneous data distributions. This paper presents Adaptive Quantization and Rerank HNSW (AQR-HNSW), a novel framework that synergistically integrates three strategies to enhance HNSW scalability. AQR-HNSW introduces (1) density-aware adaptive quantization, achieving 4x compression while preserving distance relationships; (2) multi-state re-ranking that reduces unnecessary computations by 35%; and (3) quantization-optimized SIMD implementations delivering 16-64 operations per cycle across architectures. Evaluation on standard benchmarks demonstrates 2.5-3.3x higher queries per second (QPS) than state-of-the-art HNSW implementations while maintaining over 98% recall, with 75% memory reduction for the index graph and 5x faster index construction.
title AQR-HNSW: Accelerating Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search via Density-aware Quantization and Multi-stage Re-ranking
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21600