GEM: A Native Graph-based Index for Multi-Vector Retrieval

Summary: GEM natively indexes vector sets via set-level clustering and bridged local proximity graphs, preserving fine-grained multi-vector semantics. Metric decoupling, semantic shortcuts, multi-entry beam search, and quantized distances deliver up to 16× speedups at comparable or better accuracy. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 26 2026)

Paper ID: 7438
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2026
Pagerank: 5.093636e-05
Overall Rank: 10,247 | 29.70%
DOI: 10.1145/3802065

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Authors

1. Yao Tian (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
2. Zhoujin Tian (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
3. Xi Zhao (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
4. Ruiyuan Zhang (Hong Kong Generative AI Research & Development Center)
5. Xiaofang Zhou (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{tian_sigmod26,
        title = {{GEM: A Native Graph-based Index for Multi-Vector Retrieval}},
        author = {Tian, Yao and Tian, Zhoujin and Zhao, Xi and Zhang, Ruiyuan and Zhou, Xiaofang},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '26},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3802065},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3802065},
        year = {2026}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

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Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
93	Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search With The Navigating Spreading-out Graph	2019	VLDB	0.00034701237
332	Query-Aware Locality-Sensitive Hashing for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search	2016	VLDB	0.00020920444
1,357	RaBitQ: Quantizing High-Dimensional Vectors with a Theoretical Error Bound for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search	2024	SIGMOD	0.00011043994
1,430	VHP: Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search via Virtual Hypersphere Partitioning	2020	VLDB	0.0001080902
1,546	PM-LSH: A Fast and Accurate LSH Framework for High-Dimensional Approximate NN Search	2020	VLDB	0.00010407159
1,760	Starling: An I/O-Efficient Disk-Resident Graph Index Framework for High-Dimensional Vector Similarity Search on Data Segment	2024	SIGMOD	9.8157819e-05
1,934	Towards Efficient Index Construction and Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensional Spaces	2023	VLDB	9.4561907e-05
3,108	Practical and Asymptotically Optimal Quantization of High-Dimensional Vectors in Euclidean Space for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search	2025	SIGMOD	7.7499741e-05
3,279	Locality-Sensitive Hashing Scheme based on Longest Circular Co-Substring	2020	SIGMOD	7.5711218e-05
7,266	SeeSaw: Interactive Ad-hoc Search Over Image Databases	2023	SIGMOD	5.6599652e-05

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