# LLM-Guided ANN Index Optimization for Human-Object Interaction Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05489 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05489/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Large Language Models as Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03409/) (2023)
- [Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09320/) (2016)
- [Hyperband: A Novel Bandit-Based Approach to Hyperparameter Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06560/) (2016)
- [Google Landmarks Dataset v2 -- A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01804/) (2020)
- [Learning to Detect Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05448/) (2017)
- [HOTR: End-to-End Human-Object Interaction Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13682/) (2021)
- [UniIR: Training and Benchmarking Universal Multimodal Information Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17136/) (2023)
- [ANN-Benchmarks: A Benchmarking Tool for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05614/) (2018)
- [LamRA: Large Multimodal Model as Your Advanced Retrieval Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01720/) (2024)
- [Mining the Benefits of Two-stage and One-stage HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05077/) (2021)
- [Using Large Language Models for Hyperparameter Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04528/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model Agent for Hyper-Parameter Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01881/) (2024)
- [Results of the NeurIPS'21 Challenge on Billion-Scale Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03763/) (2022)
- [λ-Tune: Harnessing Large Language Models for Automated Database System Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03500/) (2024)
- [Disentangled Pre-training for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01725/) (2024)
- [Structured Visual Search via Composition-aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14438/) (2020)
- [VDTuner: Automated Performance Tuning for Vector Data Management Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10413/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval systems underpin modern AI applications -- spanning visual search, recommendation engines, and multi-modal question answering. Modern multi-stage retrieval systems require the joint optimization of highly coupled parameters, yet traditional hyperparameter optimization (HPO) methods -- including Tree-structured Parzen Estimators (TPE) and Gaussian Process Bayesian Optimization -- rely on an independence assumption that fundamentally prevents them from navigating these coupled configuration spaces. We address this limitation with a phase-aware large language model (LLM) agent that conditions each proposal on its full optimization history, navigating the coupled parameter space across phase-partitioned exploration, exploitation, and fine-tuning stages. Evaluated on the HICO-DET human-object interaction retrieval benchmark using Intel VDMS (Visual Data Management System), our agent outperforms Optuna TPE by +33.3% and VDTuner by +34.2% under SIEVE (Safeguarded Index Evaluation of Vector-search Efficiency, a quality-constrained throughput metric), delivering a 15.3x throughput gain over UniIR. Validation across three benchmarks confirms that the agent's advantage grows with the degree of parameter coupling: +33.3% on HICO-DET (high coupling), methods converge within 1% on GLDv2 (moderate coupling) and within 3.6% on SIFT1M (near-independent control). Cross-system validation on Milvus confirms the optimizer ranks first on all three datasets without modification, demonstrating transferability across vector database management system (VDBMS) platforms.
