Tuning Reference

Tuning reference

SERAPH runs well on its defaults. These are the knobs that matter when you want to tune for your own corpus:

Setting	Default	What it controls
tau	auto	Relevance threshold — the main speed ↔ completeness dial. Higher = tighter, faster; lower = broader, deeper.
top_k	10	Number of results returned.
eigen_threshold	10	How readily hub points form — shapes the graph backbone.
search_entry_k	8	Minimum entry points per query.
search_entry_gap	0.05	Widens entry selection automatically for ambiguous queries.
search_max_depth	50	Traversal depth limit.
search_stream_threshold	50,000	Store size at which search switches to the streaming beam.

A note on measuring quality. SERAPH is deliberately not a nearest-neighbour index, so don't grade it against brute-force cosine recall — that measures the one thing it's designed not to be. The honest test is reading the results: retrieval routes by intent, and the right answer is the one the geometry reaches, not necessarily the closest vector.