Meta FAIR open-sources e-means: 10–45x faster k-means with lower loss than Lloyd's algorithm
generativist · x · 2026-11-12
Meta FAIR has open-sourced e-means, a modern replacement for Lloyd's k-means algorithm. It reaches a test loss below Lloyd's 25-epoch result in just 1.2–3 epochs, translating to 10–45x wall-clock speedups on GPU vs Flash-KMeans and 8–15x on CPU vs Faiss — improving speed and loss simultaneously. Batch sizes and step sizes are set from scaling laws, with 97 updates per epoch vs Lloyd's single full-batch update. Paper, code, and an in-browser demo are available; coauthors include Hugo Touvron and Hervé Jégou.
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