A lightweight, 100% local neuro-symbolic memory engine built for edge hardware.
Traditional local RAG setups are often bloated and unreliable. Setting up heavy vector databases like Pinecone or Milvus eats up gigabytes of RAM, and when an answer does not exist in your files, nearest-neighbor vector search still returns irrelevant text chunks that force your local LLM to hallucinate.
Hillock replaces that entire setup with a fast SQLite knowledge graph and CPU bit math. It checks whether a factual relationship actually exists before calling the model. If the fact is missing or unsupported, it refuses to guess. It runs completely offline under 1.2 GB VRAM or purely on a normal laptop CPU.
Factual Gating Before Generation
Most guardrails try to catch hallucinations after the model speaks. Hillock puts a mathematical bouncer in front of the model. If a question asks about an entity or relation that is not verified in memory, the gate blocks the prompt so the LLM never gets the chance to make up a story.
Fast Local Extraction
Instead of burning your GPU by running slow 8B generative models to read documents, Hillock uses lightweight encoder models (GLiREL Large and an ONNX-runtime MiniLM router) to extract factual links directly into SQLite. Ingestion runs at dozens of sentences per second on ordinary hardware.
Built for Potato Hardware
The entire memory and retrieval engine runs comfortably on consumer laptop CPUs without needing an NVIDIA card. Memory structures are bit-packed so similarity checks run in microseconds directly inside CPU cache.
Drop-in OpenAI API
Includes a built-in FastAPI server that exposes standard /v1/chat/completions endpoints with streaming support. You can plug it straight into AnythingLLM, Open-WebUI, or custom agent scripts without changing your application code.
Here is an actual interactive session running locally in the CLI (python main.py):
User > Where was Marie Curie born?
[HDC Gate]: Concept match passed (Cosine: 0.82 | Predicate: born_in)
[Hebbian Priming]: Associated concepts activated: Radioactivity (0.15), Nobel_Prize (0.15)
Hillock (Renderer) > Marie Curie was born in Poland (Source: science_history.txt).
User > What was the name of Marie Curie's dog?
[HDC Gate]: Predicate check failed (No matching 'has_pet' relation in graph)
Hillock > I do not have verified information about that.
User > /inspect Marie_Curie
[INSPECTING ENTITY]: Marie_Curie
Stored SPO Facts:
* [Marie_Curie] -[born_in]-> [Poland]
* [Marie_Curie] -[discovered]-> [Radioactivity]
Hebbian Synaptic Associations:
* Associated Concept: 'Radioactivity' Strength: 0.1500
* Associated Concept: 'Nobel_Prize' Strength: 0.1500
Notice what happened on the second question: instead of pulling general text about Marie Curie's life and letting the LLM invent a pet, the gate stopped the context from being sent and triggered a clean refusal.
Prerequisites: Python 3.10+ and Ollama running locally (optional if running in headless mode).
pip install hillock
python -m spacy download en_core_web_smThe setup scripts create a clean virtual environment, install dependencies, and start the console automatically.
Windows:
run.batLinux / macOS:
chmod +x run.sh
./run.shgit clone https://github.com/roandejager/Hillock.git
cd Hillock
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate # on Windows run: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -e .
python -m spacy download en_core_web_smStart the background server to connect external apps:
python api.pyThis runs locally at http://127.0.0.1:8000. In your UI (like AnythingLLM or Open-WebUI), set the API type to OpenAI and point the base URL to http://127.0.0.1:8000/v1.
If you want to test ingestion and chat directly in your shell:
python main.pyKey Commands:
/ingest [file.txt or .pdf]: Extract facts from a document into SQLite./alias [target] [canonical]: Merge two names pointing to the same node (e.g.@johnintojohn)./inspect [entity]: View stored facts and Hebbian weights for a concept./mode [strict | balanced | conversational]: Adjust how the model renders answers./model [name]: Switch your local Ollama model on the fly.
If you are building an autonomous agent or custom script and just want a fast, deterministic fact database without running an LLM:
from engine import IntegratedHillock
# Connect to memory engine (sub-200MB RAM, zero GPU)
hillock = IntegratedHillock("my_database.db")
# Query verified facts directly
query = "Where was Marie Curie born?"
entities = hillock.link_entities(query)
facts = hillock.kg.get_all_facts_for_entities(entities)
verified = hillock.select_answering_facts(query, facts)
for subject, predicate, target, doc, score in verified:
print(f"Verified Fact: [{subject}] -[{predicate}]-> [{target}] (Score: {score:.2f})")Hillock is built on three cooperating layers rather than a single massive vector index:
1. The Symbolic Graph (database.py)
Facts are stored as structured subject-predicate-object triples in SQLite using Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) for fast concurrent access. Single-valued relationships (like birthplaces or capitals) have strict overwrite safeguards, and entity aliasing prevents graph fracturing.
2. Associative Synaptic Memory (plasticity.py)
Instead of training neural weights with backpropagation, Hillock tracks concept co-occurrence using biological Hebbian learning. Concepts that are referenced together strengthen their connection, while inactive connections naturally decay over time.
3. Vector Symbolic Gating (reservoir.py)
Concepts and relations are mapped into 10,000-bit hypervectors packed into 157 uint64 words. When a question is asked, Hillock calculates late-interaction MaxSim scores using CPU bitwise XOR and hardware popcount instructions in under a millisecond. If the similarity and predicate alignment fail the threshold, the gate shuts down the generation path completely.
The repository includes reproducible evaluation tools you can run on your own machine:
-
python verify_hillock.py
Runs a 21-point CPU-only test suite validating database schema constraints, single-valued overwrites, Hebbian weight strengthening and decay, bit-packing math, and zero hallucination leaks on negative test controls. -
python evaluate_hillock_PROTO_ish.py
Runs an unseeded end-to-end evaluation testing 22 answerable factual queries and 10 unanswerable negative controls, measuring retrieval precision, recall, and hard-negative block rates. -
python benchmark_labyrinth.py
A synthetic stress harness testing multi-hop relational retrieval across 1 to 7 graph hops on local hardware, recording per-hop accuracy, refusal rates, and P95 latency.
Standardized Public Benchmarks:
We are currently setting up full evaluation runs against recognized industry harnesses (including Open RAG Bench and Enterprise RAG benchmarks) to publish comparative latency, recall, and memory ablation charts directly here on the README ASAP.
With v1.0.2 stable, the baseline memory engine, aliasing layer, and OpenAI API are locked. Our active development on the rc/v* branches is building toward v2.0:
-
Continuous Wave Math (FHRR): Moving from discrete bipolar vectors to continuous complex unit phasors ($D=2048$) in
reservoir.pyfor smoother semantic composition and L1 CPU cache alignment. - The Resonator Cortex: Implementing iterative wave resonance loops so multi-hop reasoning problems can be solved algebraically in superposition without exponential graph search.
- The Labyrinth Benchmark: Expanding our synthetic stress tests to evaluate 5-hop to 20-hop reasoning chains on consumer laptop CPUs against local and cloud LLMs.
Hillock is dual-licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0) and a commercial license.
If you want to use Hillock inside a closed-source product, proprietary SaaS, or commercial setup without releasing your application source code under AGPL-3.0, you will need a commercial license.
- AGPL-3.0 Exemption: Keep your proprietary code, models, and business logic private.
- Commercial Indemnity: Legal protection to distribute and run Hillock in commercial products.
- Direct Support: Direct access for architecture review and deployment guidance.
👉 Get a Commercial License on Polar ($49/month)
For custom SLAs, high-volume deployments, or invoice billing:
✉️ Email directly for enterprise licensing
Open-source code is released under the AGPL-3.0 License.
To keep the project sustainable while supporting commercial dual-licensing, contributors sign a standard Contributor License Agreement (CLA) via cla-assistant.io when opening a pull request. Check out CONTRIBUTING.md and CLA.md for details.