Taking two Birds with one k-NN Cache

Description

k-Nearest Neighbors aims at efficiently finding items close to a query in a large collection of objects, and it is used in different applications, from image retrieval to recommendation. These applications achieve high throughput combining two different elements: 1) approximate nearest neighbours searches that reduce the complexity at the cost of providing inexact answers and 2) caches that store the most popular items. In this paper we propose to combine the approximate index for the whole catalog with a more precise index for the items stored in the cache. Our experiments on realistic traces show that this approach is doubly advantageous as it 1) improves the quality of the final answer provided to a query, 2) additionally reduces the service latency.

Abstract

International audience

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