Makes the README's "cryptographically verifiable memory" true.
With HDF5Memory::set_signing_key(key), every checkpoint stores a signed
manifest of the store: a SHA-256 per memory record (text, embedding as
stored, channel, timestamp, session, tags, deleted flag, activation) in
a Merkle tree, plus hashes of the settings (and WAL mark), sessions and
knowledge graph. The signature, public key and manifest hashes go in
/meta; the per-record hashes in /integrity/record_hashes, so
HDF5Memory::verify(path, &public_key) can say which records changed, not
just that something did. A forged manifest fails the signature.
Decisions, as agreed:
- the key is set on the open store and never persisted;
- a signed store refuses to checkpoint without its key
(MemoryError::SigningKeyRequired); remove_signature() is the
deliberate way back to unsigned;
- checkpoints only: saves still in the WAL are not covered, and verify
reports how many there are.
The hashes cover exactly what the file persists, in the form the loader
returns it (strings lose trailing NULs; an empty WAL mark is not
written), so untouched stores verify across any number of reopen and
checkpoint cycles. MemoryError becomes #[non_exhaustive] (it already
gains variants in this unreleased version).
CLI: keygen (owner-only key file), --signing-key / CLAWHDF5_SIGNING_KEY
on writing commands (create signs immediately), verify --public-key
(JSON; exit 2 if not valid), `signed` in create/stats output.
Tests: reopen/checkpoint cycles with awkward strings (f16 and f32),
refusal without the key, wrong and rotated keys, eight kinds of edit
each detected and located, a forged manifest, unsigned stores, NULs in
text, and an edit made in place with h5py that verify pinpoints.
Cost on tank (search_harness --signing-study --full, 3 runs): ~20% of a
checkpoint (+9 ms at 10K, +89-112 ms at 100K), verify 18.6 ms / 247 ms,
32 bytes per record in the file. New deps ed25519-dalek, sha2,
rand_core: pure Rust, the no-C check passes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
`HDF5Memory::search(query_embedding, query_text, &SearchOptions)` is the
store's full search path. `SearchOptions::new(k)` is plain hybrid search
with the tuned default fusion; each further stage is opt-in:
- `with_sources([..])`: only records from these source channels. The
filter applies before ranking, so a filtered search still returns up
to k results, normalised over what it can return. The HNSW pool is
over-fetched in proportion to what the filter removes, and the allowed
records are scanned exactly whenever that costs fewer distance
evaluations than the index would (~pool x M) — and as the fallback if
the pool comes back short. Keyword matches are filtered too.
- `with_rerank(ReRankConfig)` re-ranks a max(3k, 10) candidate pool by
relevance, recency, source authority and activation;
`with_confidence(ConfidenceConfig)` drops low-confidence results;
`at_time(now)` pins the recency clock.
These were reachable only through the OpenClaw backend, which is now
`search` with both on. Its Hebbian boost now goes to the k results it
returns rather than the whole 3k candidate pool. `hybrid_search` and
`hybrid_search_with` are wrappers and unchanged (tested bit for bit).
Measured on tank (search_harness --options-study --full, 3 runs): at
100K every filter — 50%, 10%, 1% of the store, and records far from the
query — returns the exact filtered top 10, and none is slower than an
unfiltered search (1%: 2.3 ms vs 4.6 ms). Re-rank + confidence costs
about 3%. A first version decided between index and exact scan by pool
size vs store size; it measured 0.976 recall at 12.3 ms on the
far-from-query filter, which is why the rule compares costs instead.
Tests: tests/search_options.rs (filter correctness and full pages via
both paths, far-from-query fallback, edge cases, equality with
hybrid_search_with, re-rank recency, confidence, boost scope).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
The setting was persisted in /meta and otherwise ignored: embeddings
were always written as f32. It now does what it says.
clawhdf5-format:
- `DatasetBuilder::with_f16_data` writes IEEE binary16 (numpy float16),
rounding to nearest-even, and `make_f16_type`.
- `clawhdf5_format::float16` holds the f32 <-> f16 conversions, the one
implementation the writer, the reader and the agent all use. Checked
against the `half` crate on 16.7M f32 values and round-trips all 65536
half values; the h5py interop tests confirm the rounding matches
numpy's bit for bit (4020 values incl. ties, subnormals, overflow).
- Reading little-endian float16 as f32 has a fast path.
clawhdf5-agent:
- A float16 store writes /memory/embeddings as half precision, and
`MemoryCache::half_precision` rounds each embedding as it enters the
cache (save, update, WAL replay, and on load of a store still f32 on
disk), so memory and file agree bit for bit and a store searches the
same before and after a reopen (tested).
- Values beyond +-65504 are refused with the new
`MemoryError::InvalidEntry` rather than stored as infinity, on every
save path; batches are all or nothing, and a rejected ephemeral entry
stays in the ephemeral tier. Breaking for exhaustive matches.
- CLI: `create --float16`. Off by default.
Measured on tank, 384-dim, six runs alternating order, medians
(search_harness --float16-study --full): at 100K the file goes from
154.0 to 80.8 MiB (-48%), checkpoint 752 -> 512 ms, open 300 -> 252 ms;
vector recall@10 against an exact scan and hybrid_search latency do not
change. At 10K open is 3 ms slower. Also a test that h5py opens a whole
agent store, f32 and float16, and decodes every dataset.
Docs: README, BENCHMARKS.md ("float16 embedding storage"), CHANGELOG
(including the h5py interop fixes in the previous commit), CLAUDE.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
`read_from_disk` memory-mapped the file and then copied the entire
mapping into a `Vec` to hand to `File::from_bytes` — but `File::open`
memory-maps it itself whenever the facade's `mmap` feature is on, which
it is by default. So every open mapped the file, memcpy'd all of it, and
parsed the copy.
Store open at 100k x 384: 455 ms -> 327 ms, about 28% faster (two runs
after the change, 326.8 and 328.1 ms).
Peak memory is unchanged, which is worth saying because the opposite is
the natural assumption. The footprint harness now tracks a high-water
mark next to the retained figure, and it shows the peak falling after
the parse, during the index build — so a buffer allocated and freed
inside the parse never reaches it. Confirmed rather than assumed:
holding a deliberate extra copy of the whole file across the parse
leaves the peak exactly where it was, which is also what proved the
instrument was working before trusting its answer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
`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]>
The HNSW index keeps its own copy of every vector, which at 100K x 384
f32 is ~146 MiB — the largest single item in the 2.43x footprint now
that the agent stores embeddings once. `Storage::Int8` cuts that copy to
a quarter by scaling each row to i8.
The scale is per row, not global. Unit-length rows in d dimensions have
components around 1/sqrt(d), so a fixed [-1, 1] scale spends fewer than
12 of the 255 levels on a 128-dimensional vector; measured against an
exact ranking that gives 0.35 top-10 overlap. Scaling each row by its
own largest component uses the full range and brings it to 0.99.
Quantised distances still cost recall on their own, and `ef` does not
buy it back because the loss is in the distances rather than the graph:
at N=100K recall@10 tops out at 0.967 against f32's 0.9995. Re-scoring a
wider candidate pool against the exact vectors removes the gap
(0.9940 vs 0.9945 at ef=64) for ~13% of query throughput and ~16% of
build time. That is the intended use, so it is what the test asserts —
against ground truth, not against the f32 index, whose own mistakes a
re-scored search is entitled to get right.
Default is unchanged: `Storage::Float32`, chosen by every existing
constructor. Serialized indexes carry f32 vectors and no storage tag, so
a quantised index is rebuilt rather than loaded; `compact()` keeps the
storage it was given.
The harness grows `--int8` and `--rerank` axes, and reports the storage
in each table header.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
MemoryCache held every embedding in two places: a `Vec<Vec<f32>>` and a
flattened copy for the batched kernels, kept in lock-step on every push,
update and compaction. A store loaded from disk therefore carried the corpus
twice, plus one heap allocation per entry.
A new `cache::Embeddings` owns just the flat `[N x dim]` buffer and indexes
into it, so `embeddings[i]` still reads as a `&[f32]` row. The batch kernels
take a `VectorSet` (implemented for both `Embeddings` and `Vec<Vec<f32>>`)
instead of `&[Vec<f32>]`, so their callers and tests are unchanged. Loading no
longer unflattens what it just read.
100k 384-dim entries, reopened from disk: 505 -> 357 MiB, 3.44x -> 2.43x the
raw vectors. Recall (1.0000 at ef=64) and query latency are unchanged.
Rows are now always exactly `dim` long, shorter ones zero-padded. The old
representation allowed ragged rows, which silently misaligned the flattened
copy — every row after a wrong-length embedding — and `update` carried a
comment about falling back to a rebuild to avoid exactly that. It is now
unrepresentable. A record saved without an embedding holds a zero row and is
told apart by its norm, which is what `total_embeddings` now counts.
Measured with a counting allocator rather than RSS: freeing a structure
returns its pages to the allocator's pool, not the OS, so an RSS reading from
inside the process showed the two representations as identical.
Breaking: MemoryCache::embeddings changes type, embeddings_flat is replaced by
flat_embeddings(), rebuild_flat() is a deprecated no-op.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
`parallel` joins the agent's default features, so the HNSW bulk build uses the
thread pool: cold index build at 10K records 1152 -> ~380 ms in a same-moment
A/B (the graph is identical either way). Nothing else on the measured paths
changes — ingest, checkpoint, open and steady-state query times are the same
with the feature on or off. Adds rayon to the default dependency set; opt out
with `--no-default-features --features float16,hnsw`.
Harness: `--e2e-only` runs the end-to-end section without the index
benchmarks. Note for anyone comparing numbers: this machine's absolute timings
drifted ~1.5x over a long session, so only same-moment A/B runs are
comparable.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
Fusion min-max normalises over every keyword match, so hybrid_search asked
BM25 for a ranked list of the whole corpus: a hash insert per posting, then a
sort of every match, then the merge sorted every candidate again to keep k.
- BM25Index::scores returns every match unsorted, accumulated in a dense array
(contributions are strictly positive, so zero means untouched). search() is
built on it with the bounded heap.
- merge_vector_keyword partitions out its top k (select_nth) and orders only
those, with the same score-then-id order.
- Both hybrid paths use scores().
Rankings are identical (equivalence tests for both changes). p50 0.24 -> 0.07
ms (1K), 2.1 -> 0.49 ms (10K), 23 -> 4.65 ms (100K).
The harness gains --fusion-study, which measured the alternative — capping the
keyword pool — and found it changes the top-10 for most queries (overlap
0.83-0.92, different #1 for 10-35%) for only a 2x saving. Not adopted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
open() marked the HNSW index dirty, so the first search of every session
rebuilt it from scratch — 36 s at 100K records with the (better, slower)
heuristic build. First query after open is now 1.7 / 15 / 159 ms at
1K / 10K / 100K; what remains is the one-off keyword index build.
- clawhdf5-ann: HnswIndex::graph_to_bytes / from_graph_bytes serialize the
graph only (levels, tombstones, adjacency as u32, CRC32). The existing HDF5
serializer embeds a full copy of every vector, which would double a store
that already holds them. Loading validates everything — counts, levels vs
layer count, connection limits, every neighbour id and the layer it must
exist on — so a damaged graph, or a hostile one with a valid checksum, is an
error rather than an out-of-bounds walk during search.
- clawhdf5-agent: each checkpoint writes the graph to <store>.h5.ann (synced,
atomic, before the .h5) and records a fresh generation id in /meta. open()
loads the sidecar only if its generation matches that checkpoint; missing,
stale, damaged or mismatched sidecars are ignored and the index rebuilt.
Records appended through WAL replay join the loaded index incrementally; a
replayed Update or Tombstone invalidates it. snapshot() copies it. Only an
index that exactly mirrors the cache is saved; otherwise a stale sidecar is
removed.
- ensure_hnsw_fresh inserts records appended since the last sync instead of
rebuilding, so save_batch no longer marks the whole index dirty.
- CheckpointMeta { wal_applied, ann_generation } with *_with_meta build/write/
read functions; the *_with_mark ones delegate.
- Harness reports the one-off cold index build separately from the first query
after a reopen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
Neighbours were selected as the plain closest-M, for both a new node's links
and back-link pruning. On clustered data every link of a node inside a tight
cluster then goes to that same cluster, so clusters become islands a search
entering elsewhere can never reach: recall@10 was 0.87 / 0.67 / 0.31 at
1K / 10K / 100K (384-dim) and flat in ef. Uniform random data — all the
existing tests used — does not show it.
Implement the HNSW paper's Algorithm 4 with keepPrunedConnections: accept a
candidate only if it is closer to the node than to every neighbour already
accepted, then fill spare slots with the closest rejected ones. Recall@10 at
ef=64 is now 1.00 / 1.00 / 0.98 and rises with ef; uniform data improves
slightly. Build is ~3.5x slower at 10K (extra distance evaluations), to be
recovered by the distance-kernel work. The needless rayon fan-out over <=33
distances in prune_connections is gone.
Tests: a clustered-data recall test for bulk build and incremental insert
(scores 0.43 with the old selection), and a unit test of the selection rule.
Harness gains --uniform and --ann-only; before/after in BENCHMARKS.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
New clawhdf5-bench binary `search_harness`, the measurement baseline for the
search hot-path work. On deterministic clustered 384-dim data it reports HNSW
build time and, per ef, recall@10 against an exact scan, QPS and p50/p99; and
for HDF5Memory: ingest, checkpoint, open, first-query-after-open and
steady-state hybrid_search latency at 1K/10K (and 100K with --full). Optional
JSON output for tracking.
Baseline recorded in BENCHMARKS.md. It shows two problems: HNSW recall@10 does
not respond to ef and falls from 0.87 (1K) to 0.31 (100K) on clustered data,
and end-to-end hybrid_search is ~1000x slower than its vector stage because
every query rebuilds BM25 and rewrites the .h5 file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
