Linearithmic Clean-up for Vector-Symbolic Key-Value Memory with Kroneker Rotation Products

Ruipeng Liu, Qinru Qiu, Simon Khan, Garrett E. Katz

2025-06-18

Abstract

A computational bottleneck in current Vector-Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) is the ``clean-up'' step, which decodes the noisy vectors retrieved from the architecture. Clean-up typically compares noisy vectors against a ``codebook'' of prototype vectors, incurring computational complexity that is quadratic or similar. We present a new codebook representation that supports efficient clean-up, based on Kroneker products of rotation-like matrices. The resulting clean-up time complexity is linearithmic, i.e. $\mathcal{O}(N\,\text{log}\,N)$, where $N$ is the vector dimension and also the number of vectors in the codebook. Clean-up space complexity is $\mathcal{O}(N)$. Furthermore, the codebook is not stored explicitly in computer memory: It can be represented in $\mathcal{O}(\text{log}\,N)$ space, and individual vectors in the codebook can be materialized in $\mathcal{O}(N)$ time and space. At the same time, asymptotic memory capacity remains comparable to standard approaches. Computer experiments confirm these results, demonstrating several orders of magnitude more scalability than baseline VSA techniques.