Papers

ByteDance’s production memory system, written up as a VLDB 2026 industry paper. The relevant fact up front: the authors state they “have open-sourced a subset of the core capabilities of VikingMem via OpenViking” — so this is the production specification behind the context database this machine runs. Reread alongside the Context Cartography paper captured here yesterday, the two documents line up almost line for line: Cartography scored OpenViking 5/5 on selection, projection and layering, and 1/5 on simplification and aggregation; those two gaps are precisely what VikingMem implements upstream. ...

Zihua Wu (NVIDIA) and Georg Gartner (TU Wien’s cartography division) argue that context is not a passive container but a structured spatial field, and that governing it is architecturally necessary rather than a prompt-engineering nicety. Their target is the assumption that a bigger window is a better one: the lost-in-the-middle effect, “lost in the distance” degradation as token distance grows, attention entropy growth, append-only KV caches that cannot retract a stale belief, and effective context utilization that collapses long before the advertised limit is reached. ...