Topic: locality-sensitive hashing

Theory for high-dimensional nearest-neighbor search often assumes a known search radius, a specified approximation ratio, and a request for one nearby point. Practical applications instead ask for the exact k nearest points without knowing the relevant radius; an appropriate approximation parameter also depends on the data distribution. Existing reductions between these formulations introduce polylogarithmic time or space overhead that can make them unattractive in practice. This talk presents simple, more efficient reductions that solve k-nearest-neighbor search using locality-sensitive hashi

Locality-sensitive hashing is widely used for high-dimensional nearest-neighbor search. This talk develops another view of hashing as a biased sampling method for density-estimation queries. Given a point set and a query, one may estimate kernel density by summing distance-dependent influence functions, or count points within a chosen radius. A linear scan is costly for large datasets and many queries. The presentation surveys recent methods that preprocess the data and use locality-sensitive hashing to construct unbiased estimators for these problems and their extensions. It covers joint work

At extreme scale, even conventional sampling and projection methods can become too expensive. This talk treats locality-sensitive hashing as an amortized constant-time adaptive sampler, connecting probabilistic hash tables with efficient unbiased statistical estimators. A few hash lookups can support adaptive estimation at a cost close to uniform sampling. Applications include partition-function estimation for large natural-language models such as word2vec, adaptive gradient estimation for stochastic gradient descent, and sublinear deep learning with very large parameter spaces. The talk also

This two-part tutorial considers the problem of indexing points in a metric space so that a query can efficiently retrieve an approximately closest stored point. It surveys established and newer data structures for high-dimensional nearest-neighbor search. The first part examines search under the l1 and Euclidean l2 distances, including locality-sensitive hashing and data-dependent hashing. The second part turns to non-Euclidean geometries and recent approaches such as spectral partitioning for metric spaces.

Maximum inner-product search ranks candidate vectors by their unnormalized dot product with a query. This similarity creates difficulties for conventional locality-sensitive hashing. The talk introduces an asymmetric hashing framework in which queries and stored vectors undergo different transformations, turning approximate MIPS into a standard approximate nearest-neighbor problem. An explicit construction provides provably sublinear search and a simple implementation. Experiments on recommendation tasks using Netflix and MovieLens data compare the method with sign random projection and p-stab

The accelerating output of scientific research presents significant challenges in content discoverability by readers and organization by platforms. Traditional systems often fall short in dynamically accommodating such rapid expansion, hence the need for agile and adaptive solutions. We address these challenges by applying advanced Machine Learning (ML) & Natural Language Processing (NLP) to effectively manage and organize a growing collection of scientific content.Specifically, we focus on World-Wide.org, a platform hosting >3,000 scientific seminars. We use a fine-tuned DeBERTa langua