Maojia Sheng

Jiajie Fu, Junwen Chen, Mengzhao Wang et al.

Large Language Models have revolutionized interactive applications; however, their finite context windows pose a critical data management challenge for maintaining stateful, long-term interactions. Existing memory approaches often rely on simplistic extraction methods that lead to incomplete memories or use rigid, single-purpose memory extraction prompts tailored to a single use case, such as chatbots. Consequently, they lack generalizability and perform poorly across diverse downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Memory Base, a novel data management paradigm for managing the persistent state of long-term interactions. It is characterized by three core principles: selective extraction of high-value memories from raw information streams; inherent statefulness and evolution, where memory content is progressively summarized, corrected, and temporally weighted to prioritize recent interactions; and a generalizable abstraction paradigm designed for robust transferability across diverse applications, including education, recommendation, and agent memory. Building on this foundation, we present VikingMem, an end-to-end Memory Base Management System implemented on the VikingDB vector engine. VikingMem materializes this paradigm through interconnected event and entity abstractions. It features event-centric memory extraction to selectively handle complex information streams, while entities are dynamically updated by events to achieve stateful evolution. Using temporal compression via a topic-wise timeline and time-weighted recall, the system progressively produces high-level summary memories, prioritizes recent items, and compresses and fades older ones. Extensive evaluations on long-term memory benchmarks demonstrate that VikingMem outperformes baselines by up to 30% in memory retrieval effectiveness while maintaining the low latency essential for interactive applications.

Mengzhao Wang, Zheng Gong, Jingpei Hu et al.

Vector databases typically manage metadata as flat scalar attributes, which limits their ability to express hierarchical directory semantics commonly used to organize code repositories, enterprise documents, and agent memories. As a result, directory-scoped retrieval and structural updates are often implemented as application-layer workarounds, making recursive scope resolution expensive and directory maintenance difficult to keep consistent. This paper studies native directory semantics as a first-class capability for vector databases. We formalize two core operators: Directory-Semantic Query (DSQ) for hierarchically scoped retrieval, and Directory-Semantic Maintenance (DSM) for structural updates. We then evaluate three implementation strategies: query-time path expansion (PE-Online), ingestion-time path expansion (PE-Offline), and a Trie-based Hierarchical Index (TrieHI). Our analysis exposes the fundamental limitations of expansion-based designs: flattening the hierarchy incurs high recursive-query latency in PE-Online and unscalable write amplification during structural changes in both expansion strategies. In contrast, TrieHI keeps the directory topology as a native prefix tree, enabling efficient recursive retrieval through tree traversal and reducing maintenance cost through topological node manipulation. We benchmark these design points within ByteDance's Viking vector search engine and release two large-scale datasets, WIKI-Dir and ARXIV-Dir, to support future research on directory-semantic vector search. Finally, TrieHI has been integrated into OpenViking, an open-source context database for AI agents, where it supports filesystem-style context organization and directory-recursive retrieval.