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Asymmetric Quantization: Near-Lossless Retrieval with 97% Storage Reduction

mixedbread.com

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Re: Asymmetric Quantization: Near-Lossless Retrieval with 97% Storage Reduction

#11
Hey breadislove; amazing article, I’ll be sending mixedbread an email in the morning that may interest you (email will be @pm.me)

I have also been working in compression and performance engineering, and managed to get a 99+% compression unlock versus conventional approaches (100+KB down to 1KB) in the scenario of 30 minute massive multiplayer game replays for a “game+engine” I’m developing

I think there’s a synergy between these 2 concepts I’d love to chat some more

Re: Asymmetric Quantization: Near-Lossless Retrieval with 97% Storage Reduction

#12
I would love to see real examples of what reduced quality means in practice. Are you able to recover a document from the vector in a human readable format? If so, what sort of changes come up?

I could imagine a scenario where differences tend to be more substantive than you'd expect because of how less frequent words with fine distinctions in meaning - the very words that make the document special - may be embedded in the vector space.

Re: Asymmetric Quantization: Near-Lossless Retrieval with 97% Storage Reduction

#13

Hey breadislove; amazing article, I’ll be sending mixedbread an email in the morning that may interest you (email will be @pm.me) I have also been working in compression and performance engineering, and managed to get a 99+% compression unlock versus conventional approaches (100+KB down to 1KB) in the scenario of 30 minute massive multiplayer game replays for a “game+engine” I’m developing I think there’s a synergy b…

[deleted]

Re: Asymmetric Quantization: Near-Lossless Retrieval with 97% Storage Reduction

#15

there is no such thing as "near lossless"

There is, after you define what you’re ready to loose and understand the lossy space. That’s how we came up with mobile cellphones, audio and video codecs etc. Literally powering all modern devices we use.

Re: Asymmetric Quantization: Near-Lossless Retrieval with 97% Storage Reduction

#17
post #12

I would love to see real examples of what reduced quality means in practice. Are you able to recover a document from the vector in a human readable format? If so, what sort of changes come up? I could imagine a scenario where differences tend to be more substantive than you'd expect because of how less frequent words with fine distinctions in meaning - the very words that make the document special - may be embedded i…

Most of the fine distinctions are already lost when a document is processed through a pile of linear algebra to turn it into a fixed-size list of floating-point numbers, as you can see from the NDCG@10. Vector search is not a tool for fine distinctions. It's a tool for reducing a large pile of documents to a smaller selection of candidates, which you can then check individually with some more expensive method.
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