research(nightly): late-interaction-maxsim — ColBERT-style MaxSim in Rust#550
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research(nightly): late-interaction-maxsim — ColBERT-style MaxSim in Rust#550ruvnet wants to merge 3 commits into
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…teraction) Three variants of a common MaxSimIndex trait: - BruteForceIndex: exact O(N·Td·Tq·D) scan (ground truth baseline) - PlaidLiteIndex: k-means centroid pre-filter + exact MaxSim on shortlist - CompressedIndex: SQ8 i8 quantized tokens, 4× memory reduction Real benchmark (N=2000, D=64, T=16, Q=50): - brute-force: 13494 µs mean, 74 QPS, recall=1.000 (GT) - compressed: 9791 µs mean, 102 QPS, recall=0.792, 2000 KB (4× smaller) - plaid-lite: 15262 µs mean, 66 QPS, recall=0.998, 8016 KB 20/20 unit tests pass. Both acceptance criteria pass. Adds crate to workspace. No external service dependencies.
Documents the decision to add ColBERT-style MaxSim retrieval to RuVector. Covers alternatives (BM25 hybrid, full ColBERTv2), failure modes, security considerations, and migration path. References measured benchmark evidence.
Research doc covers: - 2026 SOTA survey (ColBERT, PLAID, ColBERT-Att, PyLate, LIR workshop) - 10-20 year thesis on MaxSim as a cognitive primitive - Real benchmark results captured from cargo run --release - Memory math, practical failure modes, security implications - WASM/edge/MCP/ruFlo integration roadmap - 8 practical + 8 exotic applications Gist is SEO-optimised for: ruvector, Rust vector database, ColBERT, late interaction retrieval, MaxSim, multi-vector search, agent memory.
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Summary
Adds nightly RuVector research for
late-interaction-maxsim: the first Rust-native, trait-based ColBERT-style late interaction (MaxSim) retrieval engine.What ships:
crates/ruvector-late-interaction) — 3 variants, 20/20 tests green, release build passesdocs/adr/ADR-199-late-interaction-maxsim.md)docs/research/nightly/2026-06-10-late-interaction-maxsim/README.md)docs/research/nightly/2026-06-10-late-interaction-maxsim/gist.md)Crate:
ruvector-late-interactionThree variants of a common
MaxSimIndextrait:BruteForceIndexCompressedIndexPlaidLiteIndexHardware: x86-64 Linux 6.18.5, Intel Celeron N4020, Rust 1.94.1 release.
Dataset: N=2,000 docs × 16 tokens × D=64 dims; 50 queries × 8 tokens.
Why late interaction matters for RuVector (2026)
CompressedIndex(2 MB for 2K×16×64 corpus) targets WASM and Cognitum Seed edge deployments.Ecosystem fit
ruvector-core(HNSW),ruvector-diskann(centroid lookup future),ruvector-rairs(IVF companion),ruvector-verified(proof-gated writes future),ruvector-coherence(MaxSim recall as coherence probe),ruFlo(memory loop), MCP toolsResearch doc
docs/research/nightly/2026-06-10-late-interaction-maxsim/README.mdADR
docs/adr/ADR-199-late-interaction-maxsim.mdPublic gist
docs/research/nightly/2026-06-10-late-interaction-maxsim/gist.md(ready to publish:
gh gist create --public gist.md)Generated by Claude Code