thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

AI & Machine Learning · Intermediate

Dot Product

The sum of element-wise products of two vectors, used as a similarity score in retrieval and attention.

Definition

The dot product reflects both direction and magnitude. It is computationally cheap and is used for attention scores and for maximum inner product search in vector databases.

Exam tip

For normalized vectors, dot product and cosine similarity give the same ranking.

Related terms