Valori: A Deterministic Memory Substrate for AI Systems

TL;DR

Valori introduces a deterministic memory system for AI that replaces floating-point with fixed-point arithmetic, ensuring identical results across hardware platforms, which enhances trustworthiness and verifiability.

Contribution

This work presents Valori, a novel deterministic memory substrate for AI systems using fixed-point arithmetic to guarantee bit-identical states across platforms.

Findings

Valori enforces determinism at the memory boundary.

Non-determinism arises before indexing or retrieval.

Deterministic memory improves AI system trustworthiness.

Abstract

Modern AI systems rely on vector embeddings stored and searched using floating-point arithmetic. While effective for approximate similarity search, this design introduces fundamental non-determinism: identical models, inputs, and code can produce different memory states and retrieval results across hardware architectures (e.g., x86 vs. ARM). This prevents replayability and safe deployment, leading to silent data divergence that prevents post-hoc verification and compromises audit trails in regulated sectors. We present Valori, a deterministic AI memory substrate that replaces floating-point memory operations with fixed-point arithmetic (Q16.16) and models memory as a replayable state machine. Valori guarantees bit-identical memory states, snapshots, and search results across platforms. We demonstrate that non-determinism arises before indexing or retrieval and show how Valori enforces determinism at the memory boundary. Our results suggest that deterministic memory is a necessary primitive for trustworthy AI systems. The reference implementation is open-source and available at https://github.com/varshith-Git/Valori-Kernel (archived at https://zenodo.org/records/18022660).