Researchers published a systematic analysis of multiprobe grid algorithms for approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search, characterizing performance scaling with respect to dataset size N and dimensionality d.
Grid-based methods maintain approximately constant dimensional scaling on GloVe embeddings while competing graph-, tree-, and partitioning-based methods exhibit degrading throughput; grid approaches also achieve near-linear query scaling in N and lower indexing costs.
Results suggest grid methods are competitive in high-dimensional or rebuild-heavy settings; since self-attention in transformers can be formalized as ANN operations, these N and d scaling properties may guide cost analysis of efficient transformer architectures.