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faiss/c_api
Alexandr Guzhva 799bf3aaec Introduce early stop facilities for IVF, attempt 2 (#5160)
Summary:
# Introduce early-stop controls for IVF search

This PR adds optional early-stop controls to IVF search through `SearchParametersIVF`.

IVF search looks in a sequence of buckets. Normally it keeps looking until it has checked all requested buckets. This PR adds a few ways to stop earlier:

- stop after enough candidate vectors have been checked,
- stop FastScan after enough buckets have been checked,
- stop range search after several nearby buckets produce no results.

All new fields default to disabled, so existing searches keep their current behavior unless callers opt in.

## New SearchParametersIVF fields

Default values:

| Field | Default | Effect |
|---|---:|---|
| `ensure_topk_full` | `false` | disabled; keep the existing hard `max_codes` behavior |
| `max_lists_num` | `0` | disabled; FastScan is bounded only by `nprobe` |
| `max_empty_result_buckets` | `0` | disabled; range search scans all requested probes |

`ensure_topk_full`

For k-NN search, `max_codes` limits how many candidate vectors are scanned. With `ensure_topk_full=false`, the search stops when the budget is reached.

With `ensure_topk_full=true`, very small budgets become less aggressive: `max_codes` is treated as at least `k` post-filter scans. This helps when `max_codes < k`, or when an `IDSelector` filters out many candidates before a distance is computed.

In the generic IVF path this is supported for `parallel_mode` 0 and 3. In FastScan k-NN it is supported by the per-query implementations 10 and 11.

`max_lists_num`

FastScan k-NN can also stop after visiting a limited number of inverted lists. `0` means disabled. With `ensure_topk_full`, this list budget is treated as at least `k` lists. This is only used by the FastScan per-query path (`search_implem_10`, also used for implementation 11).

When FastScan is left on `implem = 0`, setting an early-stop k-NN option makes the dispatcher choose the per-query implementation automatically. If an incompatible FastScan implementation is selected explicitly, Faiss throws instead of ignoring the option.

`max_empty_result_buckets`

This is for range search. It stops probing a query after that many consecutive probed lists add no in-radius results. The counter resets as soon as a list adds at least one result.

`0` means disabled. Setting this trades recall for less work: once nearby buckets repeatedly produce no hits, farther buckets are less likely to help.

The generic IVF range path supports this in `parallel_mode == 0`. FastScan range search also supports it through implementation 10. With `implem = 0`, FastScan selects implementation 10 automatically when this option is set; explicit incompatible implementations throw.

## Selector-aware scan accounting

This PR adds `InvertedListScannerStats`, returned by inverted-list scanner methods. It currently reports:

- `scan_cnt`: number of distances actually computed,
- `nheap_updates`: number of result updates.

The important behavior change is that `IndexIVFStats::ndis` now uses `scan_cnt`. With an `IDSelector`, candidates rejected by the selector are not counted as computed distances. Without a selector, this matches the previous count because every scanned code reaches distance computation.

This same post-filter count is used by `ensure_topk_full`, so a restrictive selector no longer consumes the search budget with candidates that were never eligible for the result heap.

## FastScan behavior

FastScan k-NN now applies `max_codes`, `max_lists_num`, and `ensure_topk_full` in the per-query implementation. The code keeps separate counters per query, so multi-query batches have independent budgets.

For `max_codes`, FastScan uses the result handler's scanned-row count. This means filtered-out rows do not consume the code budget.

FastScan range search rejects k-NN-only options (`max_codes`, `max_lists_num`, and `ensure_topk_full`). It accepts `max_empty_result_buckets` when the selected implementation can preserve per-query probe order.

## API exposure

The new fields are exposed through:

- C++ `SearchParametersIVF`,
- Python bindings,
- the C API.

The statistics is tracked via `InvertedListScanner::scan_codes(..., ResultHandler& handler)` call. In order to make it work inside `IndexIVF::search()`, it has been decided to transition it into this particular override of `InvertedListScanner::scan_codes()`. As a result, non-`ResultHandler` version of `scan_codes()` has been marked as non-virtual, so the custom `InvertedListScanner` implementations should override `ResultHandler`-based versions only. Another consequence is that `IndexIVFPQFastScanScanner` and `IndexIVFRaBitQFastScanScanner` accept only `HeapResultHandler` types of `ResultHandler`. These are the compromises that had to be made.

## Tests

The tests cover:

- default parameters preserving baseline k-NN and range-search results,
- `ensure_topk_full` filling more result slots under tight budgets,
- selector-aware `IndexIVFStats::ndis`,
- range-search early exit and counter reset behavior,
- unsupported parallel modes and FastScan implementations,
- FastScan k-NN and range-search early-stop behavior,
- Python and C API field exposure.

Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss/pull/5160

Reviewed By: limqiying

Differential Revision: D103044128

Pulled By: mnorris11

fbshipit-source-id: 80f1241c13ffc8173a3da0f2974fa9b6dd318890
2026-05-01 12:23:05 -07:00
..
2025-03-30 20:11:39 -07:00