Cost Scales with Change, Not Corpus Size: Incrementally Maintaining an Evolving Semantic Substrate

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.16621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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