English

flexvec: SQL Vector Retrieval with Programmatic Embedding Modulation

Information Retrieval 2026-03-25 v1 Artificial Intelligence Databases

Abstract

As AI agents become the primary consumers of retrieval APIs, there is an opportunity to expose more of the retrieval pipeline to the caller. flexvec is a retrieval kernel that exposes the embedding matrix and score array as a programmable surface, allowing arithmetic operations on both before selection. We refer to composing operations on this surface at query time as Programmatic Embedding Modulation (PEM). This paper describes a set of such operations and integrates them into a SQL interface via a query materializer that facilitates composable query primitives. On a production corpus of 240,000 chunks, three composed modulations execute in 19 ms end-to-end on a desktop CPU without approximate indexing. At one million chunks, the same operations execute in 82 ms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.22587,
  title  = {flexvec: SQL Vector Retrieval with Programmatic Embedding Modulation},
  author = {Damian Delmas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.22587},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

15 pages, 1 figure, 7 tables, 4 appendices. Code available at https://github.com/damiandelmas/flexvec

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:34:29.237Z