AI Glossary

Approximate nearest neighbors

Also called ANN search, approximate nearest neighbor search

What does “Approximate nearest neighbors” mean?

Approximate nearest neighbors: A family of methods for finding likely nearest items without checking every item. It trades some retrieval accuracy for faster search at scale.

Approximate nearest neighbors visual guide: A family of methods for finding likely nearest items without checking every item. It trades some retrieval accuracy for faster search at scale.
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What is an example of “Approximate nearest neighbors”?

A search engine returns a shortlist of similar images from a large embedding index without comparing every pair.

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See also

Vector indexTermVector databaseTermSemantic searchTerm

Same topic

ClusteringTermCosine similarityTermDense retrievalTermDot product similarityTermEuclidean distanceTerm