HNSW author clarifies: paper describes hnswlib's single algorithm, not all of NMSLIB
SilvioMartinico · x · 2026-11-05
The HNSW author responded to a researcher's critique, clarifying that the sentence "hnswlib implements one algorithm over uncompressed dense vectors" refers to hnswlib specifically, not the NMSLIB organization as a whole. Regarding NMSLIB, their new paper focuses on dense, sparse, and multivector representations, so nmslib is only cited in the introduction where relevant to that scope. The exchange started when a retrieval researcher argued the original description understated what is implemented under NMSLIB.
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