Embedding Compression via Spherical Coordinates
Abstract
We present an $ε$-bounded compression method for unit-norm embeddings that achieves 1.5$\times$ compression, 25% better than the best prior lossless method. The method exploits that spherical coordinates of high-dimensional unit vectors concentrate around $π/2$, causing IEEE 754 exponents to collapse to a single value and high-order mantissa bits to become predictable, enabling entropy coding of both. Reconstruction error is bounded by float32 machine epsilon ($1.19 \times 10^{-7}$), making reconstructed values indistinguishable from originals at float32 precision. Evaluation across 26 configurations spanning text, image, and multi-vector embeddings confirms consistent compression improvement with zero measurable retrieval degradation on BEIR benchmarks.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Advanced Data Compression Techniques
Algorithms and Data Compression
Numerical Methods and Algorithms
Publication details
- Journal / source
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Publication date
- 22 January 2026
- Document type
- Preprint