[2603.22587] flexvec: SQL Vector Retrieval with Programmatic Embedding Modulation

Computer Science > Information Retrieval arXiv:2603.22587 (cs) [Submitted on 23 Mar 2026] Title:flexvec: SQL Vector Retrieval with Programmatic Embedding Modulation Authors:Damian Delmas View a PDF of the paper titled flexvec: SQL Vector Retrieval with Programmatic Embedding Modulation, by Damian Delmas View PDF HTML (experimental) 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. Comments: Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Databases (cs.DB) ACM classes: H.3.3; H.3.4 Cite as: arXiv:2603.22587 [cs.IR]   (or arXiv:2603.22587v1 [cs.IR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.22587 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Damian Delmas [view emai...