AI Glossary

Hierarchical navigable small world

Also called HNSW

What does “Hierarchical navigable small world” mean?

Hierarchical navigable small world: An approximate search index that navigates layers of neighbor graphs to find similar vectors.

Hierarchical navigable small world visual guide: An approximate search index that navigates layers of neighbor graphs to find similar vectors.
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What is an example of “Hierarchical navigable small world”?

A vector database explores a sparse graph before searching a denser neighborhood.

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See also

Vector indexTermApproximate nearest neighborsTermEmbeddingsTermSparse retrievalTermInverted indexTerm

Same topic

Product quantizationTermHigh-bandwidth memoryTermGPU memoryTermHugging FaceTermGPUTerm