ANNiE: A Learned Query Cost Estimator for Graph-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

Query cost estimation is a fundamental problem in data management with numerous applications in query execution, yet remains an open problem in vector Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS). Cost estimation plays a critical role in ensuring the accuracy of ANNS results, reducing unnecessary search effort, and enabling cost-based optimization. In this paper, we define the problem of cost estimation in ANNS, analyze its challenges, and introduce ANNiE, a novel learned cost estimator designed for graph-based ANNS. ANNiE estimates the cost required to reach a specified recall target and couples its estimates with probabilistic quality guarantees. We show how ANNiE can be used to optimize search time by designing the first accuracy-guaranteed graph search algorithm. Our experimental evaluation with several workloads, demonstrates that ANNiE improves estimation accuracy by 6× over the baselines, while achieving the probabilistic guarantee. Moreover, the graph search of ANNiE, ANNiE-S, achieves a 2.3× speedup over the baselines, while automatically reaching each query's recall target.