Unified and Efficient Approach for Multi-Vector Similarity Search

NLP VDIT RecSys / IR DRSA
多向量相似性搜索在众多实际应用场景中,对于实现细粒度语义检索至关重要,其表征能力远超传统的单向量范式。然而,由于缺乏原生的多向量索引支持,现有方法不得不依赖于构建在单向量索引之上的“过滤—精炼”框架。这类方法将每个多向量对象内部的词元向量孤立看待,忽视了它们之间的内在关联,因而陷入一种固有困境:若采用激进的过滤策略,则会严重损害召回率;而若采取保守的过滤策略,又会在精炼阶段带来难以承受的计算开销。为克服这一局限,我们提出了 MV-HNSW——首个专为多向量数据设计的原生分层图索引结构。MV-HNSW 引入了一种新颖的边权重函数,该函数满足图索引所必需的关键性质(即对称性、基数鲁棒性与查询一致性);提出了一种加速的多向量相似度计算算法;并设计了一种增强型搜索策略,可动态发掘那些在拓扑结构上彼此分离、却仍与查询高度相关的目标候选对象。我们在七个真实世界数据集上开展了大量实验,结果表明:MV-HNSW 达到了当前最优的检索性能——在保持 90% 以上高召回率的同时,搜索延迟相较现有方法最多可降低 14.0 倍。
Multi-Vector Similarity Search is essential for fine-grained semantic retrieval in many real-world applications, offering richer representations than traditional single-vector paradigms. Due to the lack of native multi-vector index, existing methods rely on a filter-and-refine framework built upon single-vector indexes. By treating token vectors within each multi-vector object in isolation and ignoring their correlations, these methods face an inherent dilemma: aggressive filtering sacrifices recall, while conservative filtering incurs prohibitive computational cost during refinement. To address this limitation, we propose MV-HNSW, the first native hierarchical graph index designed for multi-vector data. MV-HNSW introduces a novel edge-weight function that satisfies essential properties (symmetry, cardinality robustness, and query consistency) for graph-based indexing, an accelerated multi-vector similarity computation algorithm, and an augmented search strategy that dynamically discovers topologically disconnected yet relevant candidates. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets show that MV-HNSW achieves state-of-the-art search performance, maintaining over 90% recall while reducing search latency by up to 14.0$\times$ compared to existing methods.
许愿