An Empirical Comparison of FAISS and FENSHSES for Nearest Neighbor Search in Hamming Space

Abstract: In this paper, we compare the performances of FAISS and FENSHSES on nearest neighbor search in Hamming space--a fundamental task with ubiquitous applications in nowadays eCommerce. Comprehensive evaluations are made in terms of indexing speed, search latency and RAM consumption. This comparison is conducted towards a better understanding on trade-offs between nearest neighbor search systems implemented in main memory and the ones implemented in secondary memory, which is largely unaddressed in literature.