Proximity

Proximity is a research project exploring the optimization and speed-recall tradeoffs of approximate vector search in high-dimensional spaces. We provide an approximate cache for vector databases that is written in Rust and exposes Python bindings.

More information is available in our main findings paper, currently under review. It expands on our EuroMLSys '25 publication.

Note: This code is under active development and is not recommended for production systems.

Installation

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the following dependencies installed:

• the Rust toolkit (Cargo and rustup are encouraged). For now, nightly is required, but a regular (non-nightly) install on your machine will automatically download the nightly compiler and use it only in this project, making this effectively transparent for the user.
• Python 3.8+
• Maturin for Rust-Python interactions (we recommend installing by running pip install maturin)

Build Instructions

python3 -m venv proxi-env
source proxi-env/bin/activate
git clone https://gitlab.epfl.ch/randl/proximity.git
cd proximity/bindings
maturin develop -r

Usage

todo

Repository Structure

├── bindings/       # Python bindings
├── core/           # Rust source code
├── ci/             # Continuous integration build scripts
├── README.md
└── LICENSE         # MIT License

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.