Quantization (Vectors)

Vector quantization is the process of representing floating-point embedding vectors with lower-precision or discrete codes to reduce memory footprint and speed up distance computation. Scalar quantization maps float32 values to int8; binary quantization maps to single bits. Both reduce storage dramatically — scalar quantization by 4× and binary by 32× — at the cost of some recall accuracy. Quantization is often combined with HNSW or IVF to serve large-scale indexes efficiently.