Prune, Don’t Rebuild: Efficiently Tuning (\alpha)-reachable Graphs For Nearest Neighbor Search | Awesome Similarity Search Papers

Prune, Don't Rebuild: Efficiently Tuning \(\alpha\)-reachable Graphs For Nearest Neighbor Search

Vector similarity search is an essential primitive in modern AI and ML applications. Most vector databases adopt graph-based approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search algorithms, such as DiskANN (Subramanya et al., 2019), which have demonstrated state-of-the-art empirical performance. DiskANN’s graph construction is governed by a reachability parameter (\alpha), which gives a trade-off between construction time, query time, and accuracy. However, adaptively tuning this trade-off typically requires rebuilding the index for different (\alpha) values, which is prohibitive at scale. In this work, we propose RP-Tuning, an efficient post-hoc routine, based on DiskANN’s pruning step, to adjust the (\alpha) parameter without reconstructing the full index. Within the (\alpha)-reachability framework of prior theoretical works (Indyk and Xu, 2023; Gollapudi et al., 2025), we prove that pruning an initially (\alpha)-reachable graph with RP-Tuning preserves worst-case reachability guarantees in general metrics and improved guarantees in Euclidean metrics. Empirically, we show that RP-Tuning accelerates DiskANN tuning on four public datasets by up to (43\times) with negligible overhead.

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