Work

TaCo: Data-adaptive and Query-aware Subspace Collision for High-dimensional Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) in high-dimensional Euclidean spaces is a fundamental problem with broad applications. Subspace Collision is a newly proposed ANNS framework that provides a novel paradigm for similarity search and achieves superior indexing and query performance. However, the subspace collision framework remains data-agnostic and query-oblivious, resulting in imbalanced index construction and wasted query overhead. In this paper, we address these limitations from two aspects: first, we design a subspace-oriented data transformation mechanism by averaging the entropies computed over each subspace of the transformed data, which ensures balanced subspace partitioning (in an information theoretical sense) and enables data-adaptive subspace collision; second, we present query-aware and scalable query strategies that dynamically allocate overhead for each query and accelerate collision probing within subspaces. Building on these ideas, we propose a novel data-adap t ive and query- a ware subspa c e c o llision method, abbreviated as TaCo, which achieves efficient and accurate ANN search while maintaining an excellent balance between indexing and query performance. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that, when compared to state-of-the-art subspace collision methods, TaCo achieves up to 8× speedup in indexing and reduces to 0.6× memory footprint, while achieving over 1.5× query throughput. Moreover, TaCo achieves state-of-the-art indexing performance and provides an effective balance between indexing and query efficiency, even when compared with advanced methods beyond the subspace-collision paradigm.

Source: Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data

DOI: 10.1145/3802118

Authors: Jiuqi Wei, Zhenyu Liao, Ruoyu Han, Quanqing Xu, Chuanhui Yang, Themis Palpanas