Cost Scales with Change, Not Corpus Size: Incrementally Maintaining an Evolving Semantic Substrate
Retrieval-augmented and agentic question-answering systems increasingly re-derive the meaning of a corpus at query time. Put plainly, instead of re-deriving what a corpus means on every question, the work is done once when a document arrives and is thereafter merely consulted -- a compiler, not an interpreter, of meaning. An alternative is to compile that meaning once, at ingest time, into a compact, queryable semantic substrate and maintain it as the corpus evolves. The central objection is maintenance cost: rebuilding a truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) on every change appears prohibitive, and a change of embedding model seems to force a full re-embedding. We argue and show e...
| Authors | Yusuke Takahashi, Kyle Wild, Asako Uraki |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 17 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 August 2026 |
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