The Power of Asymmetry in Binary Hashing

Behnam Neyshabur, Nati Srebro, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Yury Makarychev, Payman Yadollahpour

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS 2013)

When approximating binary similarity using the hamming distance between short binary hashes, we shown that even if the similarity is symmetric, we can have shorter and more accurate hashes by using two distinct code maps. I.e.~by approximating the similarity between $x$ and $x'$ as the hamming distance between $f(x)$ and $g(x')$, for two distinct binary codes $f,g$, rather than as the hamming distance between $f(x)$ and $f(x')$.