ruvnet / ruvnet/RuVector

diskann: trained PQ is never consulted at query time — wire PQ-guided search per ADR-144

Open
#673 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
4.5k
Forks
603
Avg merge
23h 32m
Merged PRs (30d)
59

Description

Reading ruvector-diskann on current main (c55e9e89) with an eye toward contributing — the Vamana core is faithful to the paper (two-pass build, alpha-robust prune, medoid entry) and the recall harness holds up. One gap between ADR-144 and the code as wired:

ADR-144 says (Search section): "With PQ: filter candidates using approximate distance, then re-rank top results with exact L2."

What the code does today: build() trains the quantizer and encodes all vectors (index.rs:133-145), and save/load round-trip the codes (index.rs:261-274, 383-399) — but search() (index.rs:169-200) runs greedy_search on exact f32 vectors and re-ranks with exact L2. pq_asymmetric_distance (distance.rs:170) has no call sites in the query path. So configuring pq_subspaces > 0 today adds build time and memory without changing search behavior.

Proposal: wire PQ into the query path per the ADR's own design —

  1. At query time, build the per-query distance table (the flat table[sub * 256 + code] layout already exists in pq.rs).
  2. Greedy beam traversal scores hops via pq_asymmetric_distance (O(M) table lookups per candidate instead of O(dim) mul-adds).
  3. Exact L2 re-rank of the final beam only — the code path search() already has.

No API change; the config knobs already exist. Beyond the per-hop speedup, PQ-guided traversal is the piece that decouples graph search from full-precision vector residency, which is what unlocks true larger-than-RAM serving (filing that separately).

We'd be glad to contribute this as an additive PR, with recall@10 and latency A/B numbers in the PR body — the seeded recall harness in index.rs tests makes it easy to keep that honest.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

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 in index.rs:133-145 and search() at 169-200, then read the query-table layout in pq.rs and pq_asymmetric_distance in distance.rs:170. Wire the existing PQ data into greedy traversal while preserving exact L2 re-ranking, and use the seeded recall harness in index.rs tests to compare recall@10 and latency.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
ai, search
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Clearly specified
Newbie friendliness
68/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.