Company
Date Published
Author
Abdel Rodriguez, Zain Hasan
Word count
3432
Language
English
Hacker News points
2

Summary

Binary Quantization (BQ) is a vector compression algorithm that reduces memory requirements while trading off retrieval accuracy. It simplifies vector encoding by retaining only their directionality, with each dimension encoded as a single bit indicating whether it's positive or negative. This technique works well for high-dimensional vectors and can significantly reduce the amount of space required to store them. BQ also enables faster distance calculations between compressed binary vectors using bitwise operations. However, its effectiveness depends on data distribution and dimensionality.