Semantic islands: retrieving similar samples from a sea of images (generated with [ChatGPT Images](https://chatgpt.com/))

A Billion-Scale Retrieval System for Text-to-Image Training Data

Training a text-to-image model from scratch means finding, inspecting and filtering samples across billions of image–text pairs. Using a retrieval system over 1.4B samples as an example, this post covers data storage and management, distributed embedding extraction, building and querying an IVF-PQ index, and online retrieval and cluster browsing.

 · 19 min · 3927 words · Elliot Song