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A Comprehensive Survey and Experimental Comparison of Graph-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

Summary: Systematically taxonomizes and benchmarks 13 graph-based ANNS algorithms across 20 real and synthetic datasets using a unified, fine-grained pipeline. Reveals component-level tradeoffs, practitioner guidelines, and an optimized method that surpasses prior state of the art. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID
h83962197cd936477
Venue
VLDB
Year
2021
Pagerank
0.00020455839
Overall Rank
344 | 97.69%
DOI
10.14778/3476249.3476255
PDF
Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{wang_vldb21,
        title = {{A Comprehensive Survey and Experimental Comparison of Graph-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search}},
        author = {Wang, Mengzhao and Xu, Xiaoliang and Yue, Qiang and Wang, Yuxiang},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '21},
        volume = {14},
        number = {11},
        pages = {1964--1978},
        doi = {10.14778/3476249.3476255},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3476249.3476255},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 83 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
803 RaBitQ: Quantizing High-Dimensional Vectors with a Theoretical Error Bound for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 SIGMOD 0.00013838349
1,166 Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in Multi-dimensional Databases 2023 SIGMOD 0.0001172922
1,600 High-Dimensional Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search: with Reliable and Efficient Distance Comparison Operations 2023 SIGMOD 0.00010111099
1,603 Starling: An I/O-Efficient Disk-Resident Graph Index Framework for High-Dimensional Vector Similarity Search on Data Segment 2024 SIGMOD 0.00010100279
1,618 Towards Efficient Index Construction and Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensional Spaces 2023 VLDB 0.00010053127
1,958 SeRF: Segment Graph for Range-Filtering Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 SIGMOD 9.3118048e-05
2,061 Similarity search in the blink of an eye with compressed indices 2023 VLDB 9.1002904e-05
2,264 ELPIS: Graph-Based Similarity Search for Scalable Data Science 2023 VLDB 8.7286407e-05
2,717 iRangeGraph: Improvising Range-dedicated Graphs for Range-filtering Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 SIGMOD 8.0953706e-05
2,783 Navigating Labels and Vectors: A Unified Approach to Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 SIGMOD 8.0204877e-05
2,821 Practical and Asymptotically Optimal Quantization of High-Dimensional Vectors in Euclidean Space for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 7.9674226e-05
2,872 Graph-Based Vector Search: An Experimental Evaluation of the State-of-the-Art 2025 SIGMOD 7.9191725e-05
3,378 SymphonyQG: Towards Symphonious Integration of Quantization and Graph for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 7.3542798e-05
3,882 RoarGraph: A Projected Bipartite Graph for Efficient Cross-Modal Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 VLDB 6.9477043e-05
4,051 Revisiting the Index Construction of Proximity Graph-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 VLDB 6.8266649e-05
4,347 UNIFY: Unified Index for Range Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbors Search 2025 VLDB 6.6457039e-05
4,600 Steiner-Hardness: A Query Hardness Measure for Graph-Based ANN Indexes 2024 VLDB 6.5055567e-05
4,718 Maximum Inner Product is Query-Scaled Nearest Neighbor 2025 VLDB 6.4524035e-05
5,415 GTS: GPU-based Tree Index for Fast Similarity Search 2024 SIGMOD 6.1378972e-05
5,530 DET-LSH: A Locality-Sensitive Hashing Scheme with Dynamic Encoding Tree for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 VLDB 6.0907372e-05
5,620 A Topology-Aware Localized Update Strategy for Graph-Based ANN Index 2026 VLDB 6.0596841e-05
5,886 MIRAGE-ANNS: Mixed Approach Graph-based Indexing for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 5.955484e-05
6,127 DIGRA: A Dynamic Graph Indexing for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search with Range Filter 2025 SIGMOD 5.8757178e-05
6,244 Efficient Data-aware Distance Comparison Operations for High-Dimensional Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 VLDB 5.8355024e-05
6,461 Efficient Dynamic Indexing for Range Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 5.7744005e-05
6,612 Dumpy: A Compact and Adaptive Index for Large Data Series Collections 2023 SIGMOD 5.732933e-05
6,873 AquaPipe: A Quality-Aware Pipeline for Knowledge Retrieval and Large Language Models 2025 SIGMOD 5.6572631e-05
6,921 GTI: Graph-based Tree Index with Logarithm Updates for Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensional Spaces 2025 VLDB 5.641565e-05
7,006 Accelerating Graph Indexing for ANNS on Modern CPUs 2025 SIGMOD 5.6212001e-05
7,267 Subspace Collision: An Efficient and Accurate Framework for High-dimensional Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 5.5677188e-05
7,308 RWalks: Random Walks as Attribute Diffusers for Filtered Vector Search 2025 SIGMOD 5.5559693e-05
7,594 Scalable Graph Indexing using GPUs for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2026 SIGMOD 5.4865404e-05
7,600 DEG: Efficient Hybrid Vector Search Using the Dynamic Edge Navigation Graph 2025 SIGMOD 5.4854217e-05
7,811 PDX: A Data Layout for Vector Similarity Search 2025 SIGMOD 5.4476368e-05
8,039 VecFlow: A High-Performance Vector Data Management System for Filtered-Search on GPUs 2026 SIGMOD 5.4009572e-05
8,265 Attribute Filtering in Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search: An In-depth Experimental Study 2026 SIGMOD 5.3639904e-05
8,350 Fast Graph Vector Search via Hardware Acceleration and Delayed-Synchronization Traversal 2025 VLDB 5.3481387e-05
8,405 TOD: GPU-accelerated Outlier Detection via Tensor Operations 2023 VLDB 5.3370629e-05
8,413 GaussDB-Vector: A Large-Scale Persistent Real-Time Vector Database for LLM Applications 2025 VLDB 5.3343137e-05
8,416 Fast Approximate Similarity Join in Vector Databases 2025 SIGMOD 5.3341916e-05
8,651 Cohesiveness-aware Hierarchical Compressed Index for Community Search on Attributed Graphs 2025 SIGMOD 5.2929907e-05
9,146 DARTH: Declarative Recall Through Early Termination for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2026 SIGMOD 5.2199557e-05
9,568 Distribution-Aware Exploration for Adaptive HNSW Search 2026 SIGMOD 5.154741e-05
9,917 Cardinality Estimation for Similarity Search on High-Dimensional Data Objects: The Impact of Reference Objects 2025 VLDB 5.1079647e-05
10,068 Fast Search-By-Classification for Large-Scale Databases Using Index-Aware Decision Trees and Random Forests 2023 VLDB 5.0851868e-05
10,083 Accelerating Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in Hierarchical Graphs: Efficient Level Navigation with Shortcuts 2025 VLDB 5.0806786e-05
10,231 CoTra: Towards Efficient and Scalable Distributed Vector Search with RDMA 2026 SIGMOD 5.0547568e-05
10,328 PGTuner: An Efficient Framework for Automatic and Transferable Configuration Tuning of Proximity Graphs 2026 SIGMOD 5.0322912e-05
10,330 Dynamically Detect and Fix Hardness for Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2026 SIGMOD 5.0322912e-05
10,332 WoW: A Window-to-Window Incremental Index for Range-Filtering Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2026 SIGMOD 5.0322912e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
45 A Quantitative Analysis and Performance Study for Similarity-Search Methods in High-Dimensional Spaces 1998 VLDB 0.00045027197
74 Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search With The Navigating Spreading-out Graph 2019 VLDB 0.00037145866
297 Query-Aware Locality-Sensitive Hashing for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2016 VLDB 0.00021849337
339 AnalyticDB-V: A Hybrid Analytical Engine Towards Query Fusion for Structured and Unstructured Data 2020 VLDB 0.00020561716
352 The Query By Image Content (QBIC) System 1995 SIGMOD 0.00020218955
648 HD-Index: Pushing the Scalability-Accuracy Boundary for Approximate kNN Search in High-Dimensional Spaces 2018 VLDB 0.00015156941
838 Improving Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search through Learned Adaptive Early Termination 2020 SIGMOD 0.0001355054
1,894 iDEC: Indexable Distance Estimating Codes for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2020 VLDB 9.4129766e-05
4,887 Permutation Search Methods are Efficient, Yet Faster Search is Possible 2015 VLDB 6.3673794e-05
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# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
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