Vector database

Vector Database

A Vector Database is a type of specialized database designed to handle vector embeddings. These embeddings are a form of data representation that conveys crucial semantic information for a variety of applications, including large language models, generative AI, and semantic search. AI models generate these embeddings, each encompassing numerous attributes or features. These features represent different dimensions of the data and are essential for understanding patterns, relationships, and underlying structures.

Functionality

Vector databases store data as high-dimensional vectors, representing features or attributes in a mathematical form. These vectors are created through various transformation or embedding functions applied to raw data like text, images, audio, video, and others. A key advantage of vector databases is their ability to carry out fast and accurate similarity searches and retrievals based on vector distance or similarity, rather than exact matches. This feature allows the database to find the most similar or relevant data based on semantic, contextual, or conceptual meaning. Typically, the output of such a search is a ranked list of vectors that bear the highest similarity to the query vector.

Use-Cases

Vector databases find widespread application in various domains requiring semantic understanding and matching of data. They are particularly useful in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision (CV), and Recommendation Systems (RS). Vector databases can also enhance large language models' (LLMs) capacity to generate relevant and coherent text by overcoming challenges such as producing hallucinated, inaccurate, or irrelevant information and maintaining factual consistency. In this scenario, a vector database stores information about different topics, keywords, facts, opinions, sources, etc., relating to a specific domain or genre. The database can then pass this information along with a request to a large language model, enabling the generation of more engaging and informative content.

See Also

• Database
• Vector Space Model
• Semantic Search
• Artificial Intelligence