STABLE: Efficient Hybrid Nearest Neighbor Search via Magnitude-Uniformity and Cardinality-Robustness

Hybrid Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (Hybrid ANNS) is a foundational search technology for large-scale heterogeneous data and has gained significant attention in both academia and industry. However, current approaches overlook the heterogeneity in data distribution, thus ignoring two major challenges: the <italic>Compatibility Barrier for Similarity Magnitude Heterogeneity</italic> and the <italic>Tolerance Bottleneck to Attribute Cardinality</italic>. To overcome these issues, we propose the robu<underline>S</underline>t he<underline>T</underline>erogeneity-<underline>A</underline>ware hy<underline>B</underline>rid retrieva<underline>L</underline> fram<underline>E</underline>work, STABLE, designed for accurate, efficient, and robust hybrid ANNS under datasets with various distributions. Specifically, we introduce an enhAnced heterogeneoUs semanTic perceptiOn (AUTO) metric to achieve a joint measurement of feature similarity and attribute consistency, addressing similarity magnitude heterogeneity and improving robustness to datasets with various attribute cardinalities. Thereafter, we construct our Heterogeneous sEmantic reLation graPh (HELP) index based on AUTO to organize heterogeneous semantic relations. Finally, we employ a novel Dynamic Heterogeneity Routing method to ensure an efficient search. Extensive experiments on five feature vector benchmarks with various attribute cardinalities demonstrate the superior performance of STABLE.