Faster Retrieval for Better, More Efficient RAG

Maximum inner product search (MIPS) sits at the core of recommendation systems, search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Given a query vector, MIPS systems search within a database of millions of candidate key vectors for the one that best matches the query. The original data point associated with that best-matching key is then used to handle the query: in RAG, the document that is best suited to answer the question is typically prefixed to the query.
As the number of keys grows to millions and vector dimensions reach thousands, the computational cost of running an exhaustive…