Subspace Collision: An Efficient and Accurate Framework for High-dimensional Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

Abstract: Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search in high-dimensional Euclidean spaces is a fundamental problem with a wide range of applications. However, there is currently no ANN method that performs well in both indexing and query answering performance, while providing rigorous theoretical guarantees for the quality of the answers. In this paper, we first design SC-score, a metric that we show follows the Pareto principle and can act as a proxy for the Euclidean distance between data points. Inspired by this, we propose a novel ANN search framework called Subspace Collision (SC), which can provide theoretical guarantees on the quality of its results. We further propose SuCo, which achieves efficient and accurate ANN search by designing a clustering-based lightweight index and query strategies for our proposed subspace collision framework. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that both the indexing and query answering performance of SuCo outperform state-of-the-art ANN methods that can provide theoretical guarantees, performing 1-2 orders of magnitude faster query answering with only up to one-tenth of the index memory footprint. Moreover, SuCo achieves top performance (best for hard datasets) even when compared to methods that do not provide theoretical guarantees. This paper was published in SIGMOD 2025.