NVIDIA / NVIDIA/cuvs

[EXAMPLE] Hybrid search with cuVS + cuDF

Open
#25 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

doc example exploration
Dominant language
Cuda
Stars
854
Forks
236
Avg merge
3d 3h
Merged PRs (30d)
62

Description

Hybried search is an important capability that arises in end-to-end vector databases. We have been asked now by several users whether or not metadata can be stored alongside the vectors and the usual answer is "it can, but you'd want to use soemthing like cuDF/Pandas for that". Databases like LanceDB do soemthing similar, for example, and similar to cuDF, they offer filtering / reductions / groupbys but not a first-class SQL dialect.

cuVS allows for pre-filtered search, which is often a requirement for hybrid search. Post-filtered search can also be preferred under certain circumstances, though this is often something users do themselves downstream.

cuDF offers a really powerful metadata management API and we should explore using it to implement hybrid search capabilities. At the very least, we can provide an example notebook and maybe compare cuVS+cuDF side-by-side with HNSWlib+Pandas for a direct GPU/CPU comparison. If this capability proves useful enough, we could even implement a first-class API within cuVS itself to perform hybrid search.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the proposed example notebook comparing cuVS with cuDF against HNSWlib with Pandas; the issue does not name an existing file or test. Establish whether the deliverable is only the comparison or a first-class cuVS API, then document hybrid filtering and metadata handling in the chosen example or implementation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
pandas
Domain
data, search
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.