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Retrieval & EmbeddingsMedium· Asymmetric Distance Computation· IVFADC

What does ADC stand for in IVFADC, and why is it asymme...

Asymmetric Distance Computation (ADC) optimizes the distance calculation by keeping the query vector in its original, high-precision form while comparing it against quantized database vectors. This approach is more efficient than Symmetric Distance Computation (SDC) because it requires only one lookup table per query rather than a table shared across all queries. It is particularly useful in production scenarios where the query itself may be a corpus vector.

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