# Mycelium-Index: A Streaming Approximate Nearest Neighbor Index with Myelial Edge Decay, Traffic-Driven Reinforcement, and Adaptive Living Hierarchy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11274 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11274/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09320/) (2016)
- [Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search With The Navigating Spreading-out Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00143/) (2017)
- [FreshDiskANN: A Fast and Accurate Graph-Based ANN Index for Streaming Similarity Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09613/) (2021)
- [Optimization of Indexing Based on k-Nearest Neighbor Graph for Proximity Search in High-dimensional Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07355/) (2018)
- [Graph Reordering for Cache-Efficient Near Neighbor Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03221/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present mycelium-index, a streaming approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) index for high-dimensional vector spaces, inspired by the adaptive growth patterns of biological mycelium. The system continuously adapts its topology through myelial edge decay and reinforcement, a traffic-driven living hierarchy, and hybrid deletion combining O(1) bypass for cold nodes with O(k) beam-search repair for hub nodes. Experimental evaluation on SIFT-1M demonstrates that mycelium achieves 0.927 +/- 0.028 recall@5 under FreshDiskANN's 100%-turnover benchmark protocol -- within the measurement confidence interval of FreshDiskANN's ~0.95 -- while using 5.7x less RAM (88 MB vs. >500 MB) and achieving 4.7x higher QPS (2,795 vs. ~600). On the static index, at ef=192, mycelium matches HNSW M=16 recall (0.962 vs. 0.965) at 5.2x less RAM (163 MB vs. 854 MB). Performance optimizations including NEON SIMD distance computation, Vec-backed node storage, and bitset visited tracking yield a cumulative 2.7x QPS improvement. A systematic study of ten streaming repair mechanisms finds that geometric heuristics universally fail in high dimensions, while topological mechanisms succeed -- a principle we term the topological repair invariance of high-dimensional ANN graphs.