为多向量检索设计了高效图索引,速度提升16倍且不损失精度。
GEM: A Native Graph-based Index for Multi-Vector Retrieval
- 直接构建向量集的邻近图,保留细粒度语义信息。
- 在跨域和多模态测试中速度比现有方法快16倍,精度相当或更优。
- 适合需要快速高精度检索的系统,如搜索引擎、推荐引擎。
在多向量检索中,查询和数据均以高维向量集合表示,可实现更细粒度的语义匹配,提升检索质量。然而,其实际应用受限于缺乏有效的索引算法。现有方法试图复用单向量索引,常无法保持多向量语义或效率低下。本文提出GEM,一种面向多向量表示的原生索引框架。核心思想是直接在向量集上构建邻近图,保留细粒度语义并支持高效导航。GEM首先设计集级别聚类方案,仅关联每个向量集最信息丰富的聚类,有效减少冗余而不影响语义覆盖;然后在聚类内构建局部邻近图,并将其连接为全局可导航结构。为应对多向量相似性的非度量特性,GEM将图构建度量与最终相关性评分解耦,并引入语义捷径引导高效导航。查询时,GEM从多个入口点启动束搜索,并利用聚类线索提前剪枝路径。为进一步提升效率,采用量化距离估计技术用于索引和搜索。在领域内、领域外及多模态基准上,GEM相较于最先进方法实现最高16倍的速度提升,同时保持或提高准确率。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In multi-vector retrieval, both queries and data are represented as sets of high-dimensional vectors, enabling finer-grained semantic matching and improving retrieval quality over single-vector approaches. However, its practical adoption is held back by the lack of effective indexing algorithms. Existing work, attempting to reuse standard single-vector indexes, often fails to preserve multi-vector semantics or remains slow. In this work, we present GEM, a native indexing framework for multi-vector representations. The core idea is to construct a proximity graph directly over vector sets, preserving their fine-grained semantics while enabling efficient navigation. First, GEM designs a set-level clustering scheme. It associates each vector set with only its most informative clusters, effectively reducing redundancy without hurting semantic coverage. Then, it builds local proximity graphs within clusters and bridges them into a globally navigable structure. To handle the non-metric nature of multi-vector similarity, GEM decouples the graph construction metric from the final relevance score and injects semantic shortcuts to guide efficient navigation toward relevant regions. At query time, GEM launches beam search from multiple entry points and prunes paths early using cluster cues. To further enhance efficiency, a quantized distance estimation technique is used for both indexing and search. Across in-domain, out-of-domain, and multi-modal benchmarks, GEM achieves up to 16x speedup over state-of-the-art methods while matching or improving accuracy.
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