AINeutralarXiv – CS AI · 7h ago6/10
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What Limits Does Quantization Place on Dense Top-$k$ Retrieval? A Theoretical Study
A theoretical study proves that quantization fundamentally limits dense top-k retrieval systems, requiring embedding dimension and precision to scale logarithmically with corpus size, contradicting prior corpus-independent bounds that assumed infinite precision. This finding has direct implications for practical vector databases and dense retrieval systems where quantization is standard practice.