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Zagreus2142 16 hours ago [-]
```
We evaluated several precision pairings across our internal retrieval benchmark suite. Scores are NDCG@10 averaged across the suite, scaled to 0–100. NDCG@10 (Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain at rank 10) measures how well the top 10 results are ordered against the ideal ranking, rewarding relevant documents more when they appear higher, with 100 being a perfect ranking. The full-precision baseline averages 90.26. Int8 query against binary documents averages 89.65, a 0.61 point drop, while reducing document-vector storage by 32x
```
Saying "Near lossless" to mean 90% accurate retrieval of saved vectors is simply a lie. Lossy-ness is binary, not something you can paper over with getting close enough. And 90% is not close. Sure, LLMs are all about gradient descent on noisy data sets so I guess this is acceptable in this field but that terminology usage still bothered me
kittoes 16 hours ago [-]
I don't believe that's what they were saying at all though. The claim appears to be that it's near lossless relative to their own baseline that uses float. Which I'd grant, since a 32x storage reduction for 0.61% loss in quality is a reasonable trade off when you've already decided to accept that ~90% is "good enough".
seritools 15 hours ago [-]
near lossless refers to being 89.65/90.26 = 99.32% of baseline, i'm pretty sure.
breadislove 15 hours ago [-]
yes exactly.
theropost 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, what bugs me about stuff like that is like they spend all this time and then they output several or minimal real testing to prove the theory It's like you're building your model to And just because it takes a long time to compute and do the testing, you'd rather publish your article and then try to get credit on something that hasn't really been proven. Look, prove your results. Study it. Ruggedize it. Make sure it works. Then, show us.
ttoinou 9 hours ago [-]
Ask a SOTA LLM when Newton was born without any access to internet : the answer is Lossless for our shared culture understanding of this question. Not Near-lossless, lossless. Ask the same LLM when YOU were born, the answer is just wrong for almost anyone in the world, not lossy. Between the two there is a whole new field of Lossyness to study.
90% depends entirely on what the measure means here, do you understand what "Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain at rank 10" means to the set of data that we are comparing ?
Sometimes coming up with new codecs (compressors decompressors) means coming up with new ways to interpret artifacts of the real world. And this is exactly why LLM are so powerful and they are like a giant Lossy (but Near-Lossless for various use cases) ZIP file / Database of the whole knowledge of the training data.
Nobody is trying to manipulate you here, humanity just has to find new explanations for complex topics.
Lossy-ness is binary
Lossless is binary in pure information theory. to quote my other comment :
Lossless is objective for information theory. To get from the real world to digital world you need an analog to digital converter, this process is by definition lossy. We are interested in the real world, and information is pure but never represents exactly reality.
Lossyness is baked into our problem statement here.
Using terms like near lossless means we think we are very close to reality for what we’re trying to do
elil17 19 hours ago [-]
I would love to see real examples of what reduced quality means in practice. Are you able to recover a document from the vector in a human readable format? If so, what sort of changes come up?
I could imagine a scenario where differences tend to be more substantive than you'd expect because of how less frequent words with fine distinctions in meaning - the very words that make the document special - may be embedded in the vector space.
yorwba 18 hours ago [-]
Most of the fine distinctions are already lost when a document is processed through a pile of linear algebra to turn it into a fixed-size list of floating-point numbers, as you can see from the NDCG@10. Vector search is not a tool for fine distinctions. It's a tool for reducing a large pile of documents to a smaller selection of candidates, which you can then check individually with some more expensive method.
breadislove 14 hours ago [-]
The ndcg loss is minimal 90.26 -> 89.65. This means it maintains most of the quality.
breadislove 15 hours ago [-]
this is the reason why we report ndcg and not recall. ndcg respects fine grained details so you get the an overview of how much details you are trading off since it would hurt the ranking.
purple-leafy 19 hours ago [-]
Hey breadislove; amazing article, I’ll be sending mixedbread an email in the morning that may interest you (email will be <5-characters>@pm.me)
I have also been working in compression and performance engineering, and managed to get a 99+% compression unlock versus conventional approaches (100+KB down to 1KB) in the scenario of 30 minute massive multiplayer game replays for a “game+engine” I’m developing
I think there’s a synergy between these 2 concepts I’d love to chat some more
palinnilap 16 hours ago [-]
Any way I can read about this or the use case? I have a hobby interest
purple-leafy 11 hours ago [-]
Yes soon I’ll be launching my game and engine, and will have a blog post - just keep an eye on Show HN over the following week
19 hours ago [-]
breadislove 15 hours ago [-]
to which email did you send it? can u send it to support please?
purple-leafy 11 hours ago [-]
Sent to the support email with the subject line “Hackernews …”
derrickquinn 14 hours ago [-]
Asymmetry is clever. FWIW, this is very similar to the strategy employed by BitNet models (i.e., int8 activations with binary or ternary weights); I suspect retrieval is a little more amenable to this approach.
In principle, binary x binary should be pretty fast since it just requires bitwise XNOR and popcount/reduction, but in practice it's slow unless you've really optimized it. And, as stated in the article, you'd still be losing a lot of accuracy that way.
kaizenite 16 hours ago [-]
To people smarter than me, how impressive and/or revolutionary is this?
alfiedotwtf 16 hours ago [-]
If you squint hard enough, it sounds like their storage layer is a bloom filter
rq1 20 hours ago [-]
The Pi compression algorithm is better.
luma 17 hours ago [-]
Doubtful. The problem with the pi idea is that you need to include the offset, which will likely be as long as or longer than your data.
nathan_compton 17 hours ago [-]
" A single document produces more then one embedding, depending on the complexity of the document it can produce hundreds or thousands of vectors."
That typo up there is kind of endearing in the AI slop era.
HenryMulligan 15 hours ago [-]
Not seeing a typo in your quote. Can you point it out?
thatspartan 14 hours ago [-]
I think they're referring to "then" vs "than"
breadislove 14 hours ago [-]
ah whoops, I'll fix it. ty!
nathan_compton 9 hours ago [-]
Genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for writing without an AI.
breadislove 6 hours ago [-]
everything worth writing, you should write yourself
vasylvd 13 hours ago [-]
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dismissed181 13 hours ago [-]
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m_m_carvalho 17 hours ago [-]
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mv_d5339e31 21 hours ago [-]
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johnathan101 22 hours ago [-]
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TradingReality 2 days ago [-]
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Ameo 21 hours ago [-]
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mwigdahl 15 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately as cost reduction trends to 100%, it comes along with an intrinsic high-pass sarcasm filter.
peheje 20 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of 'Learning to be me' by Greg Egan
throwaway2027 18 hours ago [-]
You would obviously be trading storage for compute and time to retrieve the storage.
throwaw12 20 hours ago [-]
100% reduction is impossible for something which should work, because -100% means it is now 0
neonstatic 20 hours ago [-]
They were clearly being sarcastic
functionmouse 19 hours ago [-]
there is no such thing as "near lossless"
ttoinou 18 hours ago [-]
There is, after you define what you’re ready to loose and understand the lossy space. That’s how we came up with mobile cellphones, audio and video codecs etc. Literally powering all modern devices we use.
greenleafone7 16 hours ago [-]
So then ... "lossy"
tancop 13 hours ago [-]
theres a big difference between 99% quality and 30%. near lossless is a good name for the first one. if you treat it in a binary way where everything short of 100 falls into one "lossy" bucket you lose all the practical differences that make one encoding much better than another.
functionmouse 13 hours ago [-]
> theres a big difference between 99% quality and 30%.
sure
> if you treat it in a binary way where everything short of 100 falls into one "lossy" bucket you lose all the practical differences that make one encoding much better than another.
no; lossless is an inherently binary term. and I don't lose all the practical differences of better lossy encoders by understanding that; I'm not just going to start using mp3 96k because I have an understanding of lossless vs lossy encoders...
Lossless is an objectively binary term.
ttoinou 10 hours ago [-]
Lossless is objective for information theory. To get from the real world to digital world you need an analog to digital converter, this process is by definition lossy. We are interested in the real world, and information is pure but never represents exactly reality.
Lossyness is baked into our problem statement here.
Using terms like near lossless means we think we are very close to reality for what we’re trying to do
greenleafone7 11 hours ago [-]
I agree with you somewhat, and I like what is described in the article. But I also feel like we are diluting the meaning of the word to make things sound better. Lossy/Lossless is inherently binary, and it carries a specific meaning. It would not detract from the work at all if it was described differently.
You can't be a little bit on fire :)
16 hours ago [-]
functionmouse 17 hours ago [-]
Actually, all of those things are considered "lossy".
ttoinou 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, anything not lossless is lossy. Near-lossless is not lossless, so it is lossy. I hope we speak the same language
breadislove 6 hours ago [-]
yes, your are right. what heading would you have taken here?
Saying "Near lossless" to mean 90% accurate retrieval of saved vectors is simply a lie. Lossy-ness is binary, not something you can paper over with getting close enough. And 90% is not close. Sure, LLMs are all about gradient descent on noisy data sets so I guess this is acceptable in this field but that terminology usage still bothered me
90% depends entirely on what the measure means here, do you understand what "Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain at rank 10" means to the set of data that we are comparing ?
Sometimes coming up with new codecs (compressors decompressors) means coming up with new ways to interpret artifacts of the real world. And this is exactly why LLM are so powerful and they are like a giant Lossy (but Near-Lossless for various use cases) ZIP file / Database of the whole knowledge of the training data.
Nobody is trying to manipulate you here, humanity just has to find new explanations for complex topics.
Lossless is binary in pure information theory. to quote my other comment :Lossless is objective for information theory. To get from the real world to digital world you need an analog to digital converter, this process is by definition lossy. We are interested in the real world, and information is pure but never represents exactly reality. Lossyness is baked into our problem statement here.
Using terms like near lossless means we think we are very close to reality for what we’re trying to do
I could imagine a scenario where differences tend to be more substantive than you'd expect because of how less frequent words with fine distinctions in meaning - the very words that make the document special - may be embedded in the vector space.
I have also been working in compression and performance engineering, and managed to get a 99+% compression unlock versus conventional approaches (100+KB down to 1KB) in the scenario of 30 minute massive multiplayer game replays for a “game+engine” I’m developing
I think there’s a synergy between these 2 concepts I’d love to chat some more
In principle, binary x binary should be pretty fast since it just requires bitwise XNOR and popcount/reduction, but in practice it's slow unless you've really optimized it. And, as stated in the article, you'd still be losing a lot of accuracy that way.
That typo up there is kind of endearing in the AI slop era.
sure
> if you treat it in a binary way where everything short of 100 falls into one "lossy" bucket you lose all the practical differences that make one encoding much better than another.
no; lossless is an inherently binary term. and I don't lose all the practical differences of better lossy encoders by understanding that; I'm not just going to start using mp3 96k because I have an understanding of lossless vs lossy encoders...
Lossless is an objectively binary term.
Lossyness is baked into our problem statement here.
Using terms like near lossless means we think we are very close to reality for what we’re trying to do
You can't be a little bit on fire :)