Glossary › Math

Cosine Similarity

Measures the angle between two vectors: cos(θ) = A·B / (|A|·|B|). Range [-1, 1]. Preferred for embeddings because it is magnitude-invariant — focuses on direction (meaning) not length.

Where this is taught

• Embeddings & Semantic Search — Phase 0: LLM Fast Track
• Why cos θ Measures Similarity — Phase 3: Trigonometry & Geometry Intuition
• Vector Search from Scratch: TF-IDF, BM25 & Semantic Search — Phase 0: Development Environment & Mathematical Foundations
• CLIP and Contrastive Vision-Language Pretraining — Phase 0: Multimodal Foundations
• Image Retrieval & Metric Learning — Phase 3: Generative Vision Models
• Linear Algebra for AI: Vectors, Matrices, and Transformations — Phase 0: Development Environment & Mathematical Foundations

Related terms

Embedding

More in Math

Softmax · Cross-Entropy Loss · Perplexity

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