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
+19 -3
View File
@@ -29,10 +29,26 @@ impl HDF5Memory {
// Over-fetch so the merge sees a useful vector pool; cosine
// distance from the index converts back to similarity (1 - d).
let pool = (k * 8).max(64);
let vec_scores: Vec<(usize, f32)> = index
.search(query_embedding, pool, pool)
let candidates = index.search(query_embedding, pool, pool);
// A quantised index returns approximate distances, and no
// amount of `ef` fixes that — the loss is in the distances,
// not the graph. Re-score the pool against the cache's exact
// embeddings, which cost nothing extra to keep: recall then
// matches an f32 index. See `BENCHMARKS.md`.
let exact = index.storage() == clawhdf5_ann::Storage::Int8;
let vec_scores: Vec<(usize, f32)> = candidates
.into_iter()
.map(|(id, dist)| (id, 1.0 - dist))
.map(|(id, dist)| {
let score = if exact {
crate::vector_search::cosine_similarity(
query_embedding,
&self.cache.embeddings[id],
)
} else {
1.0 - dist
};
(id, score)
})
.collect();
// Fusion normalises over every keyword match, so it needs all
// the scores — but not ranked.