All notable changes to Vettore are documented here. The project follows Semantic Versioning.
[Unreleased]
[0.3.5] - 2026-08-25
Added
- Added
Vettore.Vectoras a validated interchange layer for numeric lists, little-endian f32 binaries, dimensioned vector wrappers, and host-provided Nx tensors. - Added native metrics, normalization, and row-selective mean pooling directly over little-endian f32 binaries, including Model2Vec-style token-table pooling without materializing the full matrix on the BEAM.
- Added the zero-dependency
Vettore.Interop.Nxruntime adapter. Vettore does not declare Nx as a dependency; applications that already use Nx can opt into tensor conversion without changing Vettore's core runtime. - Added native wgpu compute kernels for every dense metric, L2/z-score/min-max
normalization, and row-selective mean pooling. CPU SIMD remains the default;
gpu: trueandgpu: :autocan be configured globally or per call with an explicit CPU/error fallback policy. - Added
Vettore.gpu_detected?/0,Vettore.gpu_info/0, andVettore.Compute.info/0for hardware detection and runtime diagnostics. - Added shape-preserving wrappers and Nx conversion, backend transfer/type
helpers, plus matrix
stack/2,take_rows_f32/4, shape, and full-validation APIs. - Added an exact GPU Flat search path with a generation-aware resident embedding matrix, one-query-by-all-rows scoring shaders for every metric, device-side two-stage top-k reduction, and readback of only the final ids and scores.
- Added batched GPU scoring for exact adaptive/hybrid reranks and a dedicated cold-upload versus warm-query Flat benchmark.
Changed
- Replaced the Flat index's fragmented vector map with a contiguous row-major matrix plus id-to-row map. CPU exact scans retain portable SIMD kernels with improved locality, while mutations atomically invalidate the optional GPU snapshot.
- Extended every
Vettore.Distancedense metric and normalization helper with per-call compute options while preserving existing arities. - Nx remains runtime-only and absent from both Mix and Cargo dependencies; GPU execution is implemented entirely in Rust and does not use Nx.
- Vectorized the f64 accumulation used by stable cosine scoring and exceptional overflow recovery, so numerical safeguards no longer force those hot loops back to scalar iteration.
- Flat index options now accept
:gpu,:gpu_min_size, and:gpu_fallback. Automatic selection uses the realrows * dimensionssearch workload. - GPU Flat queries reuse bounded pools of query, score, top-k, uniform, bind group, and staging resources. Concurrent warm searches do not hold the cache construction lock while dispatching.
- GPU calls run concurrently without a process-wide execution mutex. Runtime failures invalidate the cached device, initialization failures use a bounded retry window, and readback waits default to a configurable 10-second timeout.
Fixed
- Stabilized GPU metrics across the finite f32 range by scaling operands before shader reduction and rescaling checked results on the host. This fixes cosine overflow/underflow, cancelling extreme dot products, and large L1/L2 inputs.
- Replaced one-pass f32 normalization statistics with two-pass f64 host preparation, fixing tiny L2 vectors and catastrophic z-score cancellation.
- Guarded dispatch counts and storage bindings against the selected device limits before submitting work, preventing wgpu validation panics on oversized vectors and matrices.
- Made
gpu: :autouse CPU when no adapter is available even when the forced-GPU fallback policy is:error, and normalized runtime failures to stable atoms. - Added direct GPU NIF paths for little-endian f32 binaries, structural binary dimension checks, GPU-backed CI with lavapipe, Vector/Compute doctests, and an explicit Rust 1.91 MSRV check.
- Aligned transient CPU and GPU top-k overflow semantics with Flat search: only the unrepresentable row is skipped, while valid candidates are retained.
- Added explicit per-score validity in resident shaders so overflow cannot be mistaken for a zero-valued candidate, including at the finite f32 boundary.
- Made hardware-dependent parity tests and benchmark preflights aware of f32 reduction-order ties. Scores and unambiguous ranks remain checked, while ids may permute inside a numerically tied boundary group.
- Made the resident GPU benchmark parse metrics through a closed lookup table, fixing its CI preflight in a fresh BEAM where the requested metric atom did not already exist.
- Added strict resident-GPU parity coverage over committed and freshly inferred
384-dimensional
BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5document/query embeddings, including semantic retrieval and resident-cache reuse assertions. - Rebuilt resident buffers after every effective mutation and cached deterministic build failures by index generation, preventing repeated full snapshots for an unchanged unsupported matrix.
Performance
- GPU devices and compiled pipelines are initialized lazily and reused. CPU calls skip GPU detection entirely, and GPU mean pooling uploads only selected rows rather than the complete model matrix.
- Flat snapshot sorting, device upload, dispatch, and readback now happen outside the index read lock; writers are blocked only while the immutable host snapshot is copied.
- Replaced the single-thread-per-chunk resident top-k pass with a 16-lane local reduction followed by the compact final merge.
- Parallelized GPU mean pooling across 256 lanes per output column and scaled each selected column before accumulation, reducing drift and avoiding representable means overflowing during intermediate f32 sums.
- Cached failed GPU runtime initialization for ten seconds so hosts without an adapter do not enumerate and request a device on every fallback call.
[0.3.4] - 2026-08-23
Fixed
- Updated the local Rust toolchain pin to the crate's Rust 1.91 MSRV.
- Corrected ExDoc's landing page and source links for versioned releases.
- Replaced panic-prone HNSW graph lookups with recoverable errors and made flat/HNSW searches skip individual rows whose score overflows.
- Serialized ETS snapshots with writes so snapshots represent one consistent point in time.
- Aligned collection metric aliases with the compatibility constructor and
made empty-id reads and deletes return
{:error, :invalid_id}consistently.
Changed
- Changed the
Vettore.new/1default fromscore: :rawtoscore: :similarity, matching the compatibility API. This changesResult.scorevalues for callers that omitted the option; passscore: :rawto preserve the previous scale. Existing snapshots retain the score mode stored in their configuration. - Collections and compatibility databases are now reclaimed automatically when the process that created them exits. Long-lived resources must be created by a long-lived owner rather than handed off from a short-lived task or request process.
Security and reliability
- Capped implicit adaptive-search candidate counts at 1,000,000 and reject
adaptive searches whose result limit exceeds that bound. Explicit candidate
counts above the bound, previously accepted, now return
{:error, :invalid_candidates}. - Added Hex and RustSec dependency audits to CI.
[0.3.3] - 2026-08-12
Fixed
- Rejected non-UTF-8 ids before ETS writes and Rustler decoding, preventing a failed insert from leaving the canonical store and native index inconsistent.
- Made cosine collection ranking compute true cosine even when normalization is explicitly disabled or uses a non-L2 transform.
- Kept quantized Hamming and Jaccard candidate selection consistent with their non-zero truth semantics.
- Serialized ETS-backed store/index mutations so concurrent puts and deletes of the same id cannot leave phantom native entries.
- Corrected compatibility insert and batch return ids when an empty
idfalls back tovalue.
Changed
- Centralized index lifecycle, mutation, and search boundaries to remove cyclic module dependencies and keep flat and HNSW behavior aligned.
- Added reverse HNSW edges, diversified pruning, local reconnection after deletes, and fresh search bounds to improve recall and deletion cost.
- MMR now runs in one native batch instead of one NIF transition per pair.
- Hybrid search reuses one ETS snapshot across adaptive generators, multi-stage
funnel search narrows candidates progressively, and
close/1clears native index memory immediately.
Tests and release engineering
- Raised enforced Elixir line coverage to 99%; the full suite reaches 99.36% with 175 passing checks.
- Added a committed embedding fixture generated by the real
ex_fastembedbackend, plus deterministic offline integration tests and an opt-in fixture regeneration script. - Updated Elixir and Rust dependency locks, including
wide1.6.1.
[0.3.2] - 2026-07-21
Fixed
- Fixed HNSW reciprocal-link pruning that left almost every newly inserted node unreachable and caused severe recall loss.
- Hydrated HNSW and flat results from canonical ETS records so
valueandmetadataare preserved, while stale native ids are ignored safely. - Normalized representative vectors derived from multi-vector records before cosine indexing.
- Corrected
:negative_inner_productscore conversion and MMR similarity semantics, including malformed or missing MMR ids. - Replaced raising input paths with tagged errors for collection options, vectors, adaptive search, multi-vector scoring, and MUVERA configuration.
- Validated custom-store records before adaptive NIF calls so malformed ids, duplicate rows, dimensions, and out-of-f32 values return tagged errors rather than raising during Rustler decoding.
- Made snapshot index overrides persistent when a loaded collection is snapshotted again; added schema, record, checksum, and corruption validation.
- Loaded legacy public-table snapshots under protected ownership instead of preserving unsafe table permissions.
- Prevented collection-table leaks when index construction, snapshot restore, duplicate compatibility creation, or database deletion fails.
- Made compatibility-database shutdown atomic with concurrent collection creation and removed the unsafe timeout on large owner-mediated batches.
- Deleted drained ETS tables before acknowledging database shutdown so callers
consistently observe
{:error, :closed}immediately afterclose/1. - Added overflow-safe L2, cosine, z-score, and min-max normalization for extreme finite f32 values.
- Recovered valid large L2 and cancelling dot-product results with f64 fallback, while rejecting genuinely unrepresentable squared distances and MaxSim sums.
- Propagated metric failures through MMR and late-interaction reranking instead of silently substituting misleading zero scores.
- Bounded MUVERA seed decoding and rejected non-finite encoding accumulation instead of returning corrupted vectors.
- Kept Rust panics unwindable in release NIFs so Rustler can contain them instead of aborting the BEAM VM.
Changed
- ETS tables are now owned by supervised temporary workers instead of the process that creates a collection. Tables survive caller exit and are protected against out-of-band writes.
- Added idempotent
Vettore.close/1for deterministic collection and compatibility-database cleanup. - Collection construction and search reject unknown, duplicated, or malformed options instead of silently ignoring them.
- Snapshot files are written through a temporary file and include ETS object count and MD5 integrity metadata.
- Local Rust builds are now explicitly enabled with
VETTORE_BUILD=1; normal dependency builds use the published precompiled NIFs.
Performance
- Protected ETS tables keep concurrent-read optimization enabled while avoiding unused concurrent-writer bookkeeping behind their single supervised owner.
- Direct ETS reads no longer perform redundant owner/table liveness probes; closed-table races are handled on the actual operation instead.
- Default cosine helper calls now use one overflow-safe native kernel instead of two normalization calls followed by a third metric call.
- Exact flat search computes each metric once and retains top-k results with a bounded heap instead of sorting every record.
- HNSW batches inserts under one native write lock.
- Funnel, quantized, hybrid, and multi-vector paths batch candidate scoring into dirty CPU NIF calls, avoiding one NIF transition per record or vector pair.
Tests and release engineering
- Added 50 Rust unit tests covering every metric, scalar/SIMD differential checks, all top-k limits, HNSW graph invariants and recall, packed-bit word boundaries, multi-vector scoring, and MUVERA safety. Algorithm modules exceed 99% Rust line coverage.
- Expanded the Elixir suite to 161 passing checks, including 60 doctests, fault-injected failure paths, concurrent readers and writers, and 98%+ line coverage (excluding unmeasurable NIF fallback stubs).
- Added real
BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5exact/HNSW/hybrid integration coverage. - Added deterministic latency and overlap benchmarks for every search mode, direct MaxSim, MUVERA encodings, and the ETS read/write ownership boundary.
- Added pull-request CI for enforced Elixir and Rust algorithm coverage, Credo, Dialyzer, docs, Hex package contents, Rust formatting, tests, and Clippy.
- Added explicit Cargo feature forwarding and CI checks for Rustler NIF 2.15 and 2.16 precompiled artifact builds.
- Updated Rustler to 0.38, RustlerPrecompiled to 0.9, and
wideto 1.5. Local native builds now require Rust 1.91 or newer. - Isolated the real
ex_fastembedintegration dependency from published Hex metadata so its older Rustler constraint cannot block application updates. - Made the complete precompiled-NIF matrix manually runnable from a release branch without creating or publishing a GitHub Release.
- The tag release workflow now validates version/tag parity and publishes a generated Rustler checksum file with the native archives.
[0.3.1]
- Previous release.