RELATE: Searching Embeddings by Relation, Not Just Similarity
Embeddings are everywhere in modern AI.
They power semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, recommendations, clustering, duplicate detection, code search, memory systems, and many of the mechanisms through which an AI system decides what information is relevant.
Yet most systems interrogate embeddings in essentially the same way:
Take two vectors and calculate cosine similarity.
That is useful. But it also makes a strong assumption.
It assumes that the information we care about is expressed directly through the default geometry of the embedding space.