feat(agent): optional int8 vector index, re-scored against exact embeddings

`MemoryConfig::quantized_index` stores the HNSW index's own copy of the
embeddings as i8 rather than f32. At 100k x 384 that takes the index from
266 to 123 MiB and the whole reopened store from 399 to 256 MiB — 2.72x
to 1.74x the raw vectors, the largest remaining item in the footprint.

Quantised distances are approximate and `ef` cannot compensate, because
the loss is in the distances rather than in the graph: recall@10 tops out
at 0.967 against f32's 0.9995 and does not move between ef=128 and
ef=256. The store already holds the exact embeddings, though, so when the
index is quantised the query path re-scores the candidate pool against
them before fusion. That restores recall (0.9940 vs 0.9945 at ef=64) and
costs about 13% of QPS.

Off by default: it trades query speed for memory and which side is worth
more depends on the deployment. The flag is persisted in `/meta`, so a
reopened store does not silently revert to four times the index memory,
and the sidecar graph is rehydrated into the configured storage.

Also on the CLI as `create --quantized-index`.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
This commit is contained in:
osobh
2026-09-19 20:40:37 -07:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 57756e69ec
commit c0a9206703
12 changed files with 232 additions and 10 deletions
+5
View File
@@ -104,6 +104,10 @@ pub fn build_hdf5_file_with_meta(
"wal_max_entries",
AttrValue::I64(config.wal_max_entries as i64),
);
meta.set_attr(
"quantized_index",
AttrValue::I64(config.quantized_index.into()),
);
meta.set_attr(
"edgehdf5_version",
AttrValue::String(ZEROCLAW_VERSION.into()),
@@ -484,6 +488,7 @@ pub fn validate_and_load(
wal_max_entries: optional_i64_attr(&attrs, "wal_max_entries")
.and_then(|v| usize::try_from(v).ok())
.unwrap_or(500),
quantized_index: optional_bool_attr(&attrs, "quantized_index", false),
};
// Load /memory group