# ARM 4-BIT PQ: SIMD-based Acceleration for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search on ARM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02505 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02505/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09320/) (2016)
- [ANN-Benchmarks: A Benchmarking Tool for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05614/) (2018)
- [Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search With The Navigating Spreading-out Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00143/) (2017)
- [Revisiting the Inverted Indices for Billion-Scale Approximate Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02422/) (2018)
- [Multiplying Matrices Without Multiplying](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10860/) (2021)
- [Graph-based Nearest Neighbor Search: From Practice to Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00845/) (2019)
- [Quicker ADC : Unlocking the hidden potential of Product Quantization with SIMD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09162/) (2018)
- [Accelerated Nearest Neighbor Search with Quick ADC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07355/) (2017)
- [Link and code: Fast indexing with graphs and compact regression codes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09996/) (2018)
- [Learning to Route in Similarity Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10987/) (2019)
- [Bolt: Accelerated Data Mining with Fast Vector Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.10283/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [LotusFilter: Fast Diverse Nearest Neighbor Search via a Learned Cutoff Table](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04790/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We accelerate the 4-bit product quantization (PQ) on the ARM architecture. Notably, the drastic performance of the conventional 4-bit PQ strongly relies on x64-specific SIMD register, such as AVX2; hence, we cannot yet achieve such good performance on ARM. To fill this gap, we first bundle two 128-bit registers as one 256-bit component. We then apply shuffle operations for each using the ARM-specific NEON instruction. By making this simple but critical modification, we achieve a dramatic speedup for the 4-bit PQ on an ARM architecture. Experiments show that the proposed method consistently achieves a 10x improvement over the naive PQ with the same accuracy.