papersSEP 10 04:00 UTC
When Does Low-Bit Quantization Preserve the Decisions of Vector Search?
A new arXiv study investigates why low-bit quantization delivers high recall on some embedding types while failing sharply on others, a difference that average distortion and global rank correlation cannot explain. The authors analyze quantized vector search at the level of individual comparisons to identify when compressed indexes still reproduce full-precision retrieval decisions.