Vector databases manage large collections of embedding vectors. As AI applications are growing rapidly, so are the number of embeddings that need to be stored and indexed. The Faiss library is dedicated to vector similarity search, a core functionality of vector databases. Faiss is a toolkit of indexing methods and related primitives used to search, cluster, compress and transform vectors. This paper first describes the tradeoff space of vector search, then the design principles of Faiss in terms of structure, approach to optimization and interfacing. We benchmark key features of the library and discuss a few selected applications to highlight its broad applicability.
View on arXiv@article{douze2025_2401.08281,
title={ The Faiss library },
author={ Matthijs Douze and Alexandr Guzhva and Chengqi Deng and Jeff Johnson and Gergely Szilvasy and Pierre-Emmanuel Mazaré and Maria Lomeli and Lucas Hosseini and Hervé Jégou },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.08281},
year={ 2025 }
}