embeddings4j

Embeddings4j is an in-memory vector database optimized for storage and efficient searching of defaultEmbeddings.

Use Cases (Why would I need that?)

• You want to prototype quickly and do not want to depend on remote or commercial vector DBs.
• You want to store your data in separate persistent storage and use an in-memory DB as an index for fast lookup.
• You want to use it for integration testing.

Current State:

• Implemented using HNSW.
• Uses cosine distance for similarity search.
• Supports float and double types for vectors.
• Supports storing ID and contents along with the vector, so you can:
  • Store vectors together with contents in-memory (if you want to have the fastest search and your data fits into memory).
  • Store vector by ID (if you want to store your data in another location and use in-memory database as a fast index).
  • Both (mix as you wish).

Planned Improvements / Features:

• More data types for vectors.
• Updates/deletes of existing embeddings/vectors.
• Dynamic DB size (currently, you have to define max size during DB initialization).
• Serialization of DB to disk or other persistent storage and deserializing it back.
• Consider using more efficient/compact data types instead of floats/doubles (to save memory and speed up storage/search).
• Consider using quantization (to save memory and speed up storage/search).
• Consider reducing dimensionality of vectors (to save memory and speed up storage/search).
• Please let us know what you need.

Requirements

• Java 8 or later.

Start Using

Maven:

<dependency>
  <groupId>dev.ai4j</groupId>
  <artifactId>embeddings4j</artifactId>
  <version>0.2.0</version>
</dependency>

Gradle:

implementation 'dev.ai4j:embeddings4j:0.2.0'

How to Use

// Init DB
int dimensions = 2; // low number for easy understanding
int maxSize = 10000;
InMemoryVectorDatabase db = new InMemoryVectorDatabase(dimensions, maxSize);

// Create embeddings
DefaultEmbedding embedding1 = DefaultEmbedding.of("1", "text 1", asList(3.0f, 5.0f));
DefaultEmbedding embedding2 = DefaultEmbedding.of("2", "text 2", asList(2.0f, 2.0f));
DefaultEmbedding embedding3 = DefaultEmbedding.of("3", "text 3", asList(4.0f, 2.0f));
DefaultEmbedding embedding4 = DefaultEmbedding.of("4", "text 4", asList(3.0f, 1.0f));

// Insert embeddings into DB
db.insert(embedding1, embedding2, embedding3, embedding4);

// Create search query
DefaultEmbedding referenceEmbedding = DefaultEmbedding.of("5", "text 5", asList(1.0f, 3.0f));
int maxResults = 2;
SearchNearestQuery<String, String, Float> query = new SearchNearestQuery<>(referenceEmbedding, maxResults);

// Execute query
List<SearchNearestResult<String, String, Float>> results = db.execute(query);

// Observe results
assertThat(results).hasSize(maxResults);
assertThat(results.get(0).embedding()).isEqualTo(embedding1);
assertThat(results.get(1).embedding()).isEqualTo(embedding2);