bench: make the vector stage real, and measure BM25 vs vector vs hybrid (Tier 4b)

Every LongMemEval number this project has published measured BM25 alone. The
bench passed zero-vector embeddings with vector_weight=0.0, so the HNSW/vector
stage — the thing the README credits for retrieval quality — contributed
nothing and was never tested.

An optional `embeddings` feature loads all-MiniLM-L6-v2 via candle and encodes
the corpus for real. It is off by default and nothing in the shipped crates
depends on it, so a project that advertises no heavyweight dependencies keeps
that property; without the feature the bench behaves exactly as before.

Full haystack, n=500, turn-level:

                          Hit@1    Hit@5   Hit@10      MRR
    BM25 only             53.8%    75.0%    81.6%   0.6320
    Vector only           36.0%    71.8%    81.6%   0.5027
    Hybrid 0.7/0.3        44.4%    79.2%    86.0%   0.5868

Session-level, hybrid leads outright: 88.2 / 95.8 / 97.8 / 0.9158.

The hybrid claim holds for depth and not for precision@1. Hybrid is the best
configuration at Hit@5 and Hit@10 at both granularities — turn-level Hit@5 gains
4.2 points over BM25 and 7.4 over vector-only, which is the result that justifies
running two stages at all. But BM25 alone still leads turn-level Hit@1 and MRR,
so fusing buys deeper recall and pays at rank 1. Callers assembling five memories
of context want hybrid; callers taking a single top hit are better served by BM25
today. The 0.7/0.3 weights are the documented default, not a searched optimum.

omni-cortex's four-signal ablation found the same direction independently — there,
adding BM25 to a dense retriever raised nDCG@5 while lowering Hit@1 and MRR. Two
codebases, two fusion schemes, same trade.

Vector-only trailing BM25 at every turn-level cutoff except Hit@10 is stated
plainly rather than buried: LongMemEval questions share heavy vocabulary with
their evidence turns, which is close to the best case for lexical matching, and
MiniLM at 384-d is a small model.

Implementation notes:
  - Texts are deduplicated before encoding. The haystack sessions are drawn from
    a shared pool, so 500 questions x 493.5 turns collapses to 190,015 unique
    strings — the difference between encoding the corpus once and per question.
  - `embeddings-cuda` adds the GPU path, and it is not a convenience: 190k texts
    take ~13 min on an RTX 5060 Ti, while the same work on 8 CPU cores was still
    unfinished after 30 minutes. The device is selected at runtime with a CPU
    fallback, so a machine without CUDA still works.
  - Mean-pooling is masked and the output L2-normalised, which is the published
    recipe for this checkpoint (not the [CLS] pooler).

One measurement wrinkle, recorded rather than smoothed over: on the oracle
variant BM25-only reads 84.2% Hit@5 with real embedding vectors present against
84.4% with zero vectors — one question of 500 changes rank, MRR identical at
0.6597. On the full haystack the two agree exactly. Weight 0.0 evidently does not
make the vector stage bit-for-bit absent from candidate selection on a small
corpus.

Verified on the Linux dev host: 49 groups / 1659 passed / 0 failed, clippy clean
under -D warnings, fmt clean, with and without the feature.

crates/clawhdf5-bench/src/bin/longmemeval_bench.rs

@@ -49,12 +49,56 @@
 use std::collections::{HashMap, HashSet};
 use std::time::{Duration, Instant};
 
+// `#[path]` keeps the module beside its binary without Cargo autodiscovering it
+// as a second bin target (which a bare `src/bin/embedder.rs` would be).
+#[cfg(feature = "embeddings")]
+#[path = "longmemeval_bench/embedder.rs"]
+mod embedder;
+
 use clawhdf5_agent::{AgentMemory, HDF5Memory, MemoryConfig, MemoryEntry};
 use serde::Deserialize;
 use tempfile::TempDir;
 
 const EMBEDDING_DIM: usize = 384;
 
+/// A retrieval configuration: how much of the score comes from each stage.
+#[derive(Clone, Copy)]
+struct Mode {
+    label: &'static str,
+    vector_weight: f32,
+    keyword_weight: f32,
+}
+
+/// The only mode available without real embeddings. Passing zero vectors with
+/// `vector_weight = 0.0` is what made the vector stage inert.
+const BM25_ONLY: Mode = Mode {
+    label: "BM25 only (vector stage inert)",
+    vector_weight: 0.0,
+    keyword_weight: 1.0,
+};
+#[cfg(feature = "embeddings")]
+const VECTOR_ONLY: Mode = Mode {
+    label: "Vector only (MiniLM + HNSW)",
+    vector_weight: 1.0,
+    keyword_weight: 0.0,
+};
+#[cfg(feature = "embeddings")]
+const HYBRID: Mode = Mode {
+    label: "Hybrid (0.7 vector / 0.3 BM25)",
+    vector_weight: 0.7,
+    keyword_weight: 0.3,
+};
+
+/// Text -> embedding, built once for the whole corpus.
+type EmbeddingMap = HashMap<String, Vec<f32>>;
+
+/// Look up a real embedding, falling back to zeros when running BM25-only.
+fn embedding_for(map: Option<&EmbeddingMap>, text: &str) -> Vec<f32> {
+    map.and_then(|m| m.get(text))
+        .cloned()
+        .unwrap_or_else(|| vec![0.0f32; EMBEDDING_DIM])
+}
+
 // ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 // JSON data types
 // ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
@@ -196,7 +240,12 @@ struct EvalResult {
     latency: Duration,
 }
 
-fn evaluate_question(q: &Question, top_k: usize) -> EvalResult {
+fn evaluate_question(
+    q: &Question,
+    top_k: usize,
+    mode: Mode,
+    embeddings: Option<&EmbeddingMap>,
+) -> EvalResult {
     let dir = TempDir::new().expect("failed to create temp dir");
     let mut config = MemoryConfig::new(dir.path().join("lme.h5"), "lme-bench", EMBEDDING_DIM);
     config.wal_enabled = false;
@@ -218,7 +267,7 @@ fn evaluate_question(q: &Question, top_k: usize) -> EvalResult {
         for turn in session {
             entries.push(MemoryEntry {
                 chunk: turn.content.clone(),
-                embedding: vec![0.0f32; EMBEDDING_DIM],
+                embedding: embedding_for(embeddings, &turn.content),
                 source_channel: "longmemeval".to_string(),
                 timestamp: ts,
                 session_id: sess_id.to_string(),
@@ -246,10 +295,15 @@ fn evaluate_question(q: &Question, top_k: usize) -> EvalResult {
     // Set of session IDs that contain the answer
     let answer_sess_set: HashSet<&str> = q.answer_session_ids.iter().map(String::as_str).collect();
 
-    // Run hybrid search (BM25-only: vector_weight=0.0, keyword_weight=1.0)
-    let zero_emb = vec![0.0f32; EMBEDDING_DIM];
+    let query_emb = embedding_for(embeddings, &q.question);
     let t0 = Instant::now();
-    let results = memory.hybrid_search(&zero_emb, &q.question, 0.0, 1.0, top_k);
+    let results = memory.hybrid_search(
+        &query_emb,
+        &q.question,
+        mode.vector_weight,
+        mode.keyword_weight,
+        top_k,
+    );
     let latency = t0.elapsed();
 
     // Session-level recall
@@ -384,12 +438,20 @@ impl DatasetProfile {
     }
 }
 
-fn print_report(overall: &Metrics, by_type: &HashMap<String, Metrics>, profile: &DatasetProfile) {
+fn print_report(
+    overall: &Metrics,
+    by_type: &HashMap<String, Metrics>,
+    profile: &DatasetProfile,
+    mode: Mode,
+) {
     println!("=================================================================");
-    println!("  LongMemEval Benchmark  (BM25-only retrieval, zero embeddings)");
+    println!("  LongMemEval Benchmark  —  {}", mode.label);
     println!("=================================================================");
     println!();
-    println!("Mode: vector_weight=0.0 / keyword_weight=1.0 (pure BM25)");
+    println!(
+        "Mode: vector_weight={:.1} / keyword_weight={:.1}",
+        mode.vector_weight, mode.keyword_weight
+    );
     println!();
     println!("Scoring target: RETRIEVAL RECALL (did the gold memory land in top-k).");
     println!("  No answer is generated or scored. This is NOT the official");
@@ -516,7 +578,10 @@ fn print_report(overall: &Metrics, by_type: &HashMap<String, Metrics>, profile:
     println!("```json");
     println!("{{");
     println!("  \"benchmark\": \"longmemeval\",");
-    println!("  \"mode\": \"bm25_only\",");
+    println!(
+        "  \"mode\": \"vector_{:.1}_keyword_{:.1}\",",
+        mode.vector_weight, mode.keyword_weight
+    );
     println!("  \"dataset_variant\": \"{}\",", profile.variant());
     println!("  \"scoring_target\": \"retrieval_recall\",");
     println!("  \"k\": 10,");
@@ -585,6 +650,7 @@ fn print_report(overall: &Metrics, by_type: &HashMap<String, Metrics>, profile:
 fn main() {
     let mut json_path: Option<String> = None;
     let mut limit: Option<usize> = None;
+    let mut weights_dir: Option<String> = None;
     let mut args = std::env::args().skip(1);
     while let Some(arg) = args.next() {
         match arg.as_str() {
@@ -592,6 +658,9 @@ fn main() {
                 let v = args.next().expect("--limit needs a value");
                 limit = Some(v.parse().expect("--limit must be a positive integer"));
             }
+            "--embeddings" => {
+                weights_dir = Some(args.next().expect("--embeddings needs a directory"));
+            }
             "--help" | "-h" => {
                 eprintln!(
                     "usage: longmemeval_bench [PATH] [--limit N]\n\n\
@@ -600,7 +669,13 @@ fn main() {
                               variant it was given rather than trusting the filename.\n\
                      --limit  evaluate N questions, sampled evenly across the file\n\
                               rather than as a prefix — the dataset is ordered by\n\
-                              question type, so a prefix samples one type only."
+                              question type, so a prefix samples one type only.\n\
+                     --embeddings DIR\n\
+                              directory holding all-MiniLM-L6-v2's model.safetensors\n\
+                              and tokenizer.json. Enables the vector stage and reports\n\
+                              BM25-only, vector-only, and hybrid separately. Requires\n\
+                              --features embeddings; without it the vector stage is\n\
+                              inert and only the BM25 row is produced."
                 );
                 return;
             }
@@ -650,6 +725,63 @@ fn main() {
         profile.evidence_density * 100.0,
     );
 
+    // Build the embedding table once for the whole corpus, if asked for.
+    let embeddings: Option<EmbeddingMap> = weights_dir
+        .as_deref()
+        .map(|dir| load_embeddings(dir, &questions));
+    if embeddings.is_none() && weights_dir.is_some() {
+        eprintln!("warning: --embeddings ignored (build with --features embeddings)");
+    }
+
+    let modes: Vec<Mode> = if embeddings.is_some() {
+        #[cfg(feature = "embeddings")]
+        {
+            vec![BM25_ONLY, VECTOR_ONLY, HYBRID]
+        }
+        #[cfg(not(feature = "embeddings"))]
+        {
+            vec![BM25_ONLY]
+        }
+    } else {
+        vec![BM25_ONLY]
+    };
+
+    for (mode_idx, mode) in modes.iter().enumerate() {
+        eprintln!("[{}/{}] {}", mode_idx + 1, modes.len(), mode.label);
+        run_mode(&questions, *mode, embeddings.as_ref(), &profile);
+    }
+}
+
+/// Load and encode the corpus. Returns `None` unless the `embeddings` feature
+/// is compiled in, so the flag degrades to a warning rather than a hard error.
+#[cfg(feature = "embeddings")]
+fn load_embeddings(dir: &str, questions: &[Question]) -> EmbeddingMap {
+    let enc = embedder::Embedder::load(std::path::Path::new(dir))
+        .unwrap_or_else(|e| panic!("failed to load embedder from {dir}: {e}"));
+    let texts = questions.iter().flat_map(|q| {
+        q.haystack_sessions
+            .iter()
+            .flatten()
+            .map(|t| t.content.clone())
+            .chain(std::iter::once(q.question.clone()))
+    });
+    enc.encode_unique(texts)
+        .unwrap_or_else(|e| panic!("embedding failed: {e}"))
+}
+
+#[cfg(not(feature = "embeddings"))]
+fn load_embeddings(_dir: &str, _questions: &[Question]) -> EmbeddingMap {
+    EmbeddingMap::new()
+}
+
+/// Evaluate every question under one retrieval mode and print its report.
+fn run_mode(
+    questions: &[Question],
+    mode: Mode,
+    embeddings: Option<&EmbeddingMap>,
+    profile: &DatasetProfile,
+) {
+    let total = questions.len();
     let mut overall = Metrics::default();
     let mut by_type: HashMap<String, Metrics> = HashMap::new();
 
@@ -658,7 +790,7 @@ fn main() {
             eprint!("\r  [{}/{}] evaluating...", i + 1, total);
         }
 
-        let result = evaluate_question(q, 10);
+        let result = evaluate_question(q, 10, mode, embeddings);
 
         let is_abs = q.question_type.ends_with("_abs");
         let base_type = if is_abs {
@@ -723,5 +855,5 @@ fn main() {
 
     eprintln!("\r  [{total}/{total}] done.          ");
     eprintln!();
-    print_report(&overall, &by_type, &profile);
+    print_report(&overall, &by_type, profile, mode);
 }

crates/clawhdf5-bench/src/bin/longmemeval_bench/embedder.rs

@@ -0,0 +1,164 @@
+//! Optional MiniLM sentence embedder for the LongMemEval bench.
+//!
+//! Compiled only under the `embeddings` feature, so the default build of a
+//! project that prides itself on having no heavyweight dependencies stays
+//! exactly as it was. Without it the bench runs BM25-only, as it always has.
+//!
+//! Loads `sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2` — the same checkpoint
+//! omni-cortex uses — and produces 384-d mean-pooled, L2-normalised sentence
+//! embeddings, which is the published recipe for this model (mean over token
+//! states weighted by the attention mask, *not* the `[CLS]` pooler output).
+
+use std::collections::HashMap;
+use std::path::Path;
+
+use candle_core::{DType, Device, Tensor};
+use candle_nn::VarBuilder;
+use candle_transformers::models::bert::{BertModel, Config, HiddenAct};
+use tokenizers::Tokenizer;
+
+/// Sequences encoded per forward pass. Larger batches amortise the transformer
+/// call; 64 keeps peak memory modest while still saturating a CPU.
+const BATCH: usize = 64;
+
+/// A loaded MiniLM encoder.
+pub struct Embedder {
+    model: BertModel,
+    tokenizer: Tokenizer,
+    device: Device,
+}
+
+impl Embedder {
+    /// Load from a directory holding `model.safetensors` and `tokenizer.json`.
+    ///
+    /// `config.json` is read when present; otherwise the published MiniLM-L6-v2
+    /// architecture constants are used, which are pinned rather than guessed.
+    pub fn load(dir: &Path) -> Result<Self, Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
+        // CUDA when the feature is on and a device is actually present; the CPU
+        // path is correct but roughly two orders of magnitude slower, which is
+        // the difference between minutes and most of a day on the full haystack.
+        let device = match Device::new_cuda(0) {
+            Ok(d) => {
+                eprintln!("Embedder: CUDA device 0");
+                d
+            }
+            Err(e) => {
+                eprintln!("Embedder: CPU ({e})");
+                Device::Cpu
+            }
+        };
+        let weights = dir.join("model.safetensors");
+        let tok_path = dir.join("tokenizer.json");
+
+        let config: Config = match std::fs::read_to_string(dir.join("config.json")) {
+            Ok(raw) => serde_json::from_str(&raw)?,
+            Err(_) => Config {
+                vocab_size: 30_522,
+                hidden_size: 384,
+                num_hidden_layers: 6,
+                num_attention_heads: 12,
+                intermediate_size: 1_536,
+                hidden_act: HiddenAct::Gelu,
+                hidden_dropout_prob: 0.0,
+                max_position_embeddings: 512,
+                type_vocab_size: 2,
+                initializer_range: 0.02,
+                layer_norm_eps: 1e-12,
+                pad_token_id: 0,
+                position_embedding_type: Default::default(),
+                use_cache: false,
+                classifier_dropout: None,
+                model_type: None,
+            },
+        };
+
+        let vb = unsafe { VarBuilder::from_mmaped_safetensors(&[weights], DType::F32, &device)? };
+        let model = BertModel::load(vb, &config)?;
+        let tokenizer = Tokenizer::from_file(&tok_path).map_err(|e| e.to_string())?;
+
+        Ok(Self {
+            model,
+            tokenizer,
+            device,
+        })
+    }
+
+    /// Encode `texts` into 384-d unit vectors, in order.
+    fn encode_batch(&self, texts: &[&str]) -> Result<Vec<Vec<f32>>, Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
+        let mut tk = self.tokenizer.clone();
+        let tk = tk
+            .with_padding(Some(tokenizers::PaddingParams::default()))
+            .with_truncation(Some(tokenizers::TruncationParams {
+                max_length: 512,
+                ..Default::default()
+            }))
+            .map_err(|e| e.to_string())?;
+        let encodings = tk
+            .encode_batch(texts.to_vec(), true)
+            .map_err(|e| e.to_string())?;
+
+        let ids: Vec<u32> = encodings
+            .iter()
+            .flat_map(|e| e.get_ids().to_vec())
+            .collect();
+        let mask: Vec<u32> = encodings
+            .iter()
+            .flat_map(|e| e.get_attention_mask().to_vec())
+            .collect();
+        let (b, l) = (encodings.len(), encodings[0].get_ids().len());
+
+        let ids = Tensor::from_vec(ids, (b, l), &self.device)?;
+        let mask = Tensor::from_vec(mask, (b, l), &self.device)?;
+        let type_ids = ids.zeros_like()?;
+
+        let hidden = self.model.forward(&ids, &type_ids, Some(&mask))?;
+
+        // Mean-pool over real tokens only: sum(hidden * mask) / sum(mask).
+        let mask_f = mask.to_dtype(DType::F32)?.unsqueeze(2)?;
+        let summed = hidden.broadcast_mul(&mask_f)?.sum(1)?;
+        let counts = mask_f.sum(1)?.clamp(1e-9, f32::INFINITY)?;
+        let pooled = summed.broadcast_div(&counts)?;
+
+        // L2-normalise so cosine similarity is a plain dot product.
+        let norm = pooled
+            .sqr()?
+            .sum_keepdim(1)?
+            .sqrt()?
+            .clamp(1e-12, f32::INFINITY)?;
+        let normed = pooled.broadcast_div(&norm)?;
+
+        Ok(normed.to_vec2::<f32>()?)
+    }
+
+    /// Encode every distinct string in `texts` once, returning a lookup map.
+    ///
+    /// LongMemEval's haystack sessions are drawn from a shared pool, so the same
+    /// turn text recurs across many questions. Deduplicating before encoding is
+    /// the difference between encoding the corpus once and encoding it per
+    /// question.
+    pub fn encode_unique(
+        &self,
+        texts: impl IntoIterator<Item = String>,
+    ) -> Result<HashMap<String, Vec<f32>>, Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
+        let mut unique: Vec<String> = texts.into_iter().collect();
+        unique.sort_unstable();
+        unique.dedup();
+
+        let total = unique.len();
+        eprintln!("Embedding {total} unique texts with MiniLM (batch {BATCH})...");
+
+        let mut out = HashMap::with_capacity(total);
+        for (n, chunk) in unique.chunks(BATCH).enumerate() {
+            let refs: Vec<&str> = chunk.iter().map(String::as_str).collect();
+            let vecs = self.encode_batch(&refs)?;
+            for (text, v) in chunk.iter().zip(vecs) {
+                out.insert(text.clone(), v);
+            }
+            if n % 50 == 0 {
+                eprint!("\r  [{}/{}] embedded...", (n * BATCH).min(total), total);
+            }
+        }
+        eprintln!("\r  [{total}/{total}] embedded.          ");
+        Ok(out)
+    }
+}