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Effective vector representation models, e.g., word2vec and node2vec, embed real-world objects such as images and documents in high dimensional vector space. In the meanwhile, the objects are often associated with attributes such as timestamps and prices. Many scenarios need to jointly query the vector representations of the objects together with their attributes. These queries can be formalized as range-filtering approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) queries. Specifically, given a collection of data vectors, each associated with an attribute value whose domain has a total order. The range-filtering ANNS consists of a query range and a query vector. It finds the approximate nearest neighbors of the query vector among all the data vectors whose attribute values fall in the query range. Existing approaches suffer from a rapidly degrading query performance when the query range width shifts. The query performance can be optimized by a solution that builds an ANNS index for every possible query range; however, the index time and index size become prohibitive -- the number of query ranges is quadratic to the number n of data vectors. To overcome these challenges, for the query range contains all attribute values smaller than a user-provided threshold, we design a structure called the segment graph whose index time and size are the same as a single ANNS index, yet can losslessly compress the n ANNS indexes, reducing the indexing cost by a factor of Ω(n). To handle general range queries, we propose a 2D segment graph with average-case index size O(n log n) to compress n segment graphs, breaking the quadratic barrier. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets show that our proposed structures outperformed existing methods significantly; our index also exhibits superior scalability.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2026
Dynamic Range-Filtering Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search
Range-filtering approximate nearest neighbor search (RFANNS) has gained significant attention recently. Consider a setDof high-dimensional vectors, each associated with a numeric attribute value, e.g., price or timestamp. An RFANNS query consists of a query vectorqand a query range, reporting the approximate nearest neighbors ofqamong data vectors whose attributes fall in the query range. Existing work on RFANNS only considers a static setDof data vectors while in many real-world scenarios, vectors arrive in the system in an arbitrary order. This paper studies dynamic RFANNS where both data vectors and queries arrive in a mixed stream: a query is posed on all the data vectors that have already arrived in the system. Existing work on RFANNS is difficult to be extended to the streaming setting as they construct the index in the order of the attribute values while the vectors arrive in the system in an arbitrary order. The main challenge to the dynamic RFANNS lies in the difference between the two orders. A naive approach to RFANNS maintains multiple hierarchical navigable small-world (HNSW) graphs, one for each of theO(|D|2) possible query ranges - too expensive to construct and maintain. To design an index structure that can integrate new data vectors with a low index size increment for efficient and effective query processing, we propose a structure calleddynamic segment graph.It compresses the set of HNSW graphs of the naive approach, proven to be lossless under certain conditions, with only a linear to log |D| new edges in expectation when inserting a new vector. This dramatically reduces the index size while largely preserving the search performance. We further propose heuristics to significantly reduce the index cost of our dynamic segment graph in practice. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms existing methods for static RFANNS and is scalable in handling dynamic RFANNS.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2212629
- PAR ID:
- 10636937
- Publisher / Repository:
- PVLDB
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 2150-8097
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3256 to 3268
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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