Skip to main content

Sampler modes

Context assembly walks the graph: seed entity → parents (always followed) → children (fanout-capped, newest-first) → optional cohort, until the hop limit or cell budget. Two interchangeable samplers drive this walk — both produce identical contexts (asserted by tests).

RETRIEVER (default)​

Pull-per-hop: the hop loop calls your retrievers for each expansion.

Use when data is remote, huge, or access-controlled — nothing is copied, your retrievers see every access.

CSC​

The engine drains each TableScanner once into in-memory compressed-sparse-column adjacency arrays (time-sorted neighbor lists), then samples entirely in-process — "latest w children ≤ anchor" is one binary search plus a tail slice.

Use for latency-sensitive, repeated scoring over data that fits in memory. The index is a snapshot; rebuild with engine.refresh().

Context budgets​

ContextPolicy supports two geometries:

  • per-hop fanouts, e.g. fanouts(64, 64)
  • a uniform bfs_width under a global max_context_cells budget

See Choose a sampler mode for a decision guide and benchmark numbers.