[jira] [Commented] (LUCENE-9136) Introduce IVFFlat to Lucene for ANN similarity search

["Julie Tibshirani (Jira)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-9136?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=17050663#comment-17050663 ] 

Julie Tibshirani commented on LUCENE-9136:
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Hello @Xin-Chun Zhang, thanks for the updates and for trying out the idea. I was thinking we could actually reuse the existing `PostingsFormat` and `DocValuesFormat` implementations. This would have a few advantages:
* It simplifies the implementation, since we avoid duplicating a good chunk of codec writing + reading logic.
* I agree with your point that we don’t expect the cluster information to take up too much memory, since it just contains a map from centroid to the IDs of documents that belong to the cluster. I think there are still benefits to keeping the main data structures off-heap -- we’d be better able to scale to large numbers of documents, especially when multiple vector fields are defined at once. There is also no ‘loading’ step, where the data must be read into an on-heap data structure before it can be used in queries.

I created this draft PR to sketch out the idea: https://github.com/apache/lucene-solr/pull/1314. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts! I included some benchmarks, and the QPS looks okay. The indexing time is ~1 hour for 1 million points -- as we discussed earlier this is quite high, and it will be important to think about how it can be improved.

> Introduce IVFFlat to Lucene for ANN similarity search
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: LUCENE-9136
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-9136
>             Project: Lucene - Core
>          Issue Type: New Feature
>            Reporter: Xin-Chun Zhang
>            Priority: Major
>         Attachments: 1581409981369-9dea4099-4e41-4431-8f45-a3bb8cac46c0.png, image-2020-02-16-15-05-02-451.png
>
>
> Representation learning (RL) has been an established discipline in the machine learning space for decades but it draws tremendous attention lately with the emergence of deep learning. The central problem of RL is to determine an optimal representation of the input data. By embedding the data into a high dimensional vector, the vector retrieval (VR) method is then applied to search the relevant items.
> With the rapid development of RL over the past few years, the technique has been used extensively in industry from online advertising to computer vision and speech recognition. There exist many open source implementations of VR algorithms, such as Facebook's FAISS and Microsoft's SPTAG, providing various choices for potential users. However, the aforementioned implementations are all written in C++, and no plan for supporting Java interface, making it hard to be integrated in Java projects or those who are not familier with C/C++  [[https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss/issues/105]]. 
> The algorithms for vector retrieval can be roughly classified into four categories,
>  # Tree-base algorithms, such as KD-tree;
>  # Hashing methods, such as LSH (Local Sensitive Hashing);
>  # Product quantization based algorithms, such as IVFFlat;
>  # Graph-base algorithms, such as HNSW, SSG, NSG;
> where IVFFlat and HNSW are the most popular ones among all the VR algorithms.
> IVFFlat is better for high-precision applications such as face recognition, while HNSW performs better in general scenarios including recommendation and personalized advertisement. *The recall ratio of IVFFlat could be gradually increased by adjusting the query parameter (nprobe), while it's hard for HNSW to improve its accuracy*. In theory, IVFFlat could achieve 100% recall ratio. 
> Recently, the implementation of HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World, LUCENE-9004) for Lucene, has made great progress. The issue draws attention of those who are interested in Lucene or hope to use HNSW with Solr/Lucene. 
> As an alternative for solving ANN similarity search problems, IVFFlat is also very popular with many users and supporters. Compared with HNSW, IVFFlat has smaller index size but requires k-means clustering, while HNSW is faster in query (no training required) but requires extra storage for saving graphs [indexing 1M vectors|[https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss/wiki/Indexing-1M-vectors]]. Another advantage is that IVFFlat can be faster and more accurate when enables GPU parallel computing (current not support in Java). Both algorithms have their merits and demerits. Since HNSW is now under development, it may be better to provide both implementations (HNSW && IVFFlat) for potential users who are faced with very different scenarios and want to more choices.
> The latest branch is [*lucene-9136-ann-ivfflat*]([https://github.com/irvingzhang/lucene-solr/commits/jira/lucene-9136-ann-ivfflat)|https://github.com/irvingzhang/lucene-solr/commits/jira/lucene-9136-ann-ivfflat]



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