# Thistle: A Vector Database in Rust

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16780 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16780/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [word2vec Explained: deriving Mikolov et al.'s negative-sampling word-embedding method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.3722/) (2014)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Thistle, a fully functional vector database. Thistle is an entry into the domain of latent knowledge use in answering search queries, an ongoing research topic at both start-ups and search engine companies. We implement Thistle with several well-known algorithms, and benchmark results on the MS MARCO dataset. Results help clarify the latent knowledge domain as well as the growing Rust ML ecosystem.