GoKawiilMeta FAIR open-sources e-means, a faster alternative to Lloyd's k-means algorithm
Meta FAIR has released e-means, a new k-means clustering algorithm that uses mini-batch updates with exponential moving averages instead of the decades-old MacQueen or Lloyd update rules. The company reports it reaches lower test loss than Lloyd's algorithm in 1.2 to 3 epochs versus 25, translating to 10–45x faster wall-clock performance on GPUs and 8–15x faster on CPUs compared to existing implementations like Flash-KMeans and Faiss.