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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
0.0002067515
Overall Rank
335 | 97.76%
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 84 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
802 RaBitQ: Quantizing High-Dimensional Vectors with a Theoretical Error Bound for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 SIGMOD 0.00013822222
1,165 Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in Multi-dimensional Databases 2023 SIGMOD 0.00011708765
1,601 High-Dimensional Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search: with Reliable and Efficient Distance Comparison Operations 2023 SIGMOD 0.00010092977
1,610 Starling: An I/O-Efficient Disk-Resident Graph Index Framework for High-Dimensional Vector Similarity Search on Data Segment 2024 SIGMOD 0.00010066881
1,618 Towards Efficient Index Construction and Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensional Spaces 2023 VLDB 0.00010045437
1,968 SeRF: Segment Graph for Range-Filtering Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 SIGMOD 9.2810141e-05
2,067 Similarity search in the blink of an eye with compressed indices 2023 VLDB 9.0707479e-05
2,268 ELPIS: Graph-Based Similarity Search for Scalable Data Science 2023 VLDB 8.7144632e-05
2,728 iRangeGraph: Improvising Range-dedicated Graphs for Range-filtering Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 SIGMOD 8.0686023e-05
2,791 Navigating Labels and Vectors: A Unified Approach to Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 SIGMOD 7.9939669e-05
2,836 Practical and Asymptotically Optimal Quantization of High-Dimensional Vectors in Euclidean Space for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 7.9410774e-05
2,885 Graph-Based Vector Search: An Experimental Evaluation of the State-of-the-Art 2025 SIGMOD 7.8929868e-05
3,389 SymphonyQG: Towards Symphonious Integration of Quantization and Graph for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 7.329962e-05
3,876 RoarGraph: A Projected Bipartite Graph for Efficient Cross-Modal Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 VLDB 6.9349247e-05
4,077 Revisiting the Index Construction of Proximity Graph-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 VLDB 6.8040917e-05
4,157 Steiner-Hardness: A Query Hardness Measure for Graph-Based ANN Indexes 2024 VLDB 6.7596305e-05
4,368 UNIFY: Unified Index for Range Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbors Search 2025 VLDB 6.6237291e-05
4,735 Maximum Inner Product is Query-Scaled Nearest Neighbor 2025 VLDB 6.4310678e-05
5,432 GTS: GPU-based Tree Index for Fast Similarity Search 2024 SIGMOD 6.1176015e-05
5,526 DET-LSH: A Locality-Sensitive Hashing Scheme with Dynamic Encoding Tree for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 VLDB 6.0804398e-05
5,633 A Topology-Aware Localized Update Strategy for Graph-Based ANN Index 2026 VLDB 6.039647e-05
5,903 MIRAGE-ANNS: Mixed Approach Graph-based Indexing for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 5.9357915e-05
6,141 DIGRA: A Dynamic Graph Indexing for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search with Range Filter 2025 SIGMOD 5.856289e-05
6,256 Efficient Data-aware Distance Comparison Operations for High-Dimensional Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 VLDB 5.8162066e-05
6,475 Efficient Dynamic Indexing for Range Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 5.7553067e-05
6,621 Dumpy: A Compact and Adaptive Index for Large Data Series Collections 2023 SIGMOD 5.7145251e-05
6,892 AquaPipe: A Quality-Aware Pipeline for Knowledge Retrieval and Large Language Models 2025 SIGMOD 5.6385566e-05
6,941 GTI: Graph-based Tree Index with Logarithm Updates for Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensional Spaces 2025 VLDB 5.6229105e-05
7,023 Accelerating Graph Indexing for ANNS on Modern CPUs 2025 SIGMOD 5.6026129e-05
7,286 Subspace Collision: An Efficient and Accurate Framework for High-dimensional Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 5.5493084e-05
7,326 RWalks: Random Walks as Attribute Diffusers for Filtered Vector Search 2025 SIGMOD 5.5375978e-05
7,610 Scalable Graph Indexing using GPUs for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2026 SIGMOD 5.4683985e-05
7,616 DEG: Efficient Hybrid Vector Search Using the Dynamic Edge Navigation Graph 2025 SIGMOD 5.4672835e-05
7,828 PDX: A Data Layout for Vector Similarity Search 2025 SIGMOD 5.4296235e-05
8,056 VecFlow: A High-Performance Vector Data Management System for Filtered-Search on GPUs 2026 SIGMOD 5.3830983e-05
8,087 Cohesiveness-aware Hierarchical Compressed Index for Community Search on Attributed Graphs 2025 SIGMOD 5.3746995e-05
8,281 Attribute Filtering in Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search: An In-depth Experimental Study 2026 SIGMOD 5.3462537e-05
8,364 Fast Graph Vector Search via Hardware Acceleration and Delayed-Synchronization Traversal 2025 VLDB 5.3304544e-05
8,421 TOD: GPU-accelerated Outlier Detection via Tensor Operations 2023 VLDB 5.3197436e-05
8,431 GaussDB-Vector: A Large-Scale Persistent Real-Time Vector Database for LLM Applications 2025 VLDB 5.3166752e-05
8,434 Fast Approximate Similarity Join in Vector Databases 2025 SIGMOD 5.3165535e-05
9,168 DARTH: Declarative Recall Through Early Termination for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2026 SIGMOD 5.2026953e-05
9,593 Distribution-Aware Exploration for Adaptive HNSW Search 2026 SIGMOD 5.1376962e-05
9,952 Cardinality Estimation for Similarity Search on High-Dimensional Data Objects: The Impact of Reference Objects 2025 VLDB 5.0910746e-05
10,102 Fast Search-By-Classification for Large-Scale Databases Using Index-Aware Decision Trees and Random Forests 2023 VLDB 5.068372e-05
10,117 Accelerating Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in Hierarchical Graphs: Efficient Level Navigation with Shortcuts 2025 VLDB 5.0638787e-05
10,261 CoTra: Towards Efficient and Scalable Distributed Vector Search with RDMA 2026 SIGMOD 5.0380426e-05
10,354 PGTuner: An Efficient Framework for Automatic and Transferable Configuration Tuning of Proximity Graphs 2026 SIGMOD 5.0156513e-05
10,356 Dynamically Detect and Fix Hardness for Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2026 SIGMOD 5.0156513e-05
10,358 WoW: A Window-to-Window Incremental Index for Range-Filtering Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2026 SIGMOD 5.0156513e-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 0.00044967652
75 Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search With The Navigating Spreading-out Graph 2019 VLDB 0.00037163157
286 Query-Aware Locality-Sensitive Hashing for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2016 VLDB 0.00022090962
325 AnalyticDB-V: A Hybrid Analytical Engine Towards Query Fusion for Structured and Unstructured Data 2020 VLDB 0.00020930941
350 The Query By Image Content (QBIC) System 1995 SIGMOD 0.0002018411
650 HD-Index: Pushing the Scalability-Accuracy Boundary for Approximate kNN Search in High-Dimensional Spaces 2018 VLDB 0.00015142453
837 Improving Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search through Learned Adaptive Early Termination 2020 SIGMOD 0.00013530806
1,881 iDEC: Indexable Distance Estimating Codes for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2020 VLDB 9.4262036e-05
4,868 Permutation Search Methods are Efficient, Yet Faster Search is Possible 2015 VLDB 6.3593681e-05
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