maxsim-web

⚡ JavaScript/WASM MaxSim implementation for ColBERT and late-interaction retrieval

High-performance MaxSim computation optimized for JavaScript environments with progressive enhancement from pure JS to WASM+SIMD. The JavaScript counterpart to mixedbread-ai/maxsim-cpu.

Installation

npm install maxsim-web

Quick Start

import { MaxSim } from 'maxsim-web';

// Auto-selects best backend (WASM → JS optimized → baseline)
const maxsim = await MaxSim.create({ normalized: true });

// Single document scoring
const score = maxsim.maxsim(queryEmbedding, docEmbedding);

// Batch scoring (optimized)
const scores = maxsim.maxsimBatch(queryEmbedding, [doc1, doc2, doc3]);

Use Cases

Perfect for:

• 🌐 Browser-based search - Client-side semantic search
• 🔌 Chrome extensions - Real-time document similarity
• ⚡ Node.js APIs - Fast similarity scoring endpoints
• 📱 Progressive web apps - Offline-capable search
• 🎯 Prototyping - Quick ColBERT integration testing

Performance

Progressive enhancement automatically selects the fastest available backend:

*Actual performance: 21,218 docs/s vs 1,871 docs/s baseline (11.3x speedup)

API

MaxSim.create(options)

• backend: 'auto' | 'wasm' | 'js-optimized' | 'js-baseline'
• normalized: boolean - Pre-normalized embeddings (default: false)

maxsim.maxsim(query, doc)

Compute MaxSim score between query and document embeddings.

maxsim.maxsimBatch(query, docs)

Batch compute MaxSim scores (optimized for multiple documents).

MaxSim.normalize(embedding)

L2 normalize embeddings.

Why maxsim-cpu.js?

JavaScript/WASM-optimized implementation of MaxSim computation, complementing the original mixedbread-ai/maxsim-cpu:

Features

• Zero dependencies - Lightweight and fast to install
• Universal compatibility - Browser and Node.js
• Progressive enhancement - Automatically uses fastest available backend
• TypeScript support - Full type definitions included
• Web-optimized - Built specifically for JavaScript environments

When to Use

Use maxsim-cpu.js when:

• Building web applications or browser extensions
• Need client-side MaxSim computation
• Want zero-dependency JavaScript solution
• Targeting Node.js environments
• Building real-time search interfaces

Use maxsim-cpu when:

• Building production backends
• Need maximum CPU performance
• Have access to native libraries
• Running on dedicated servers

Related Projects

• mixedbread-ai/maxsim-cpu - Original high-performance CPU implementation
• ColBERT - Late interaction retrieval model
• sentence-transformers - Sentence embedding models

License

MIT - Inspired by mixedbread-ai/maxsim-cpu