Research into persistent agent memory architectures. Structured, queryable memory systems for long-running LLM agents.
Independent Research Lab · United Kingdom
We investigate the foundations of machine reasoning, computational intelligence, and safe AI systems — then publish everything. Our research artefacts span LLM cognition, formal optimisation, edge inference, and high-performance computing.
Research Areas
Each research area addresses an open problem at the frontier of AI and computational science.
How do we formalise the relationship between prompt structure and model behaviour? We study declarative prompt specification, automatic optimisation, and routing — treating prompts as first-class research objects rather than ad-hoc strings.
What does it take to run AI-generated code safely? Our research into memory-safe language design, container sandboxing, and NUMA-aware scheduling explores the systems foundations needed for trustworthy autonomous computation.
Can natural language interface with mathematical solvers? We investigate the bridge between human intent and formally provable solutions — from constraint satisfaction to quantitative signal compilation and intelligent ranking algorithms.
What are the limits of local inference? We study on-device LLM execution, mobile agent architectures, and privacy-preserving AI — exploring how much intelligence can live at the edge without any cloud dependency.
How do autonomous agents reason, plan, and coordinate in the physical world? We study discrete-event simulation, deterministic RL benchmarks, and the systems engineering that turns research code into reproducible robotics experiments.
Research Artefacts
Every repository is both a research contribution and a usable tool — MIT or GPL-3.0 licensed for the community.
Research into persistent agent memory architectures. Structured, queryable memory systems for long-running LLM agents.
Contracts, quality measurement, and audit trails for AI agent communication — between MCP, A2A, and your application.
Investigating unified local LLM serving. A drop-in Ollama replacement exploring model management and inference unification.
Studying prompt lifecycle management. Extracts prompts from codebases and versions them as first-class dependencies.
Exploring multi-modal generation pipelines. Text-to-video synthesis combining LLM scripting with generative media models.
Studying AI-assisted data analysis with formal validation. An SQL co-pilot that learns query patterns while preserving privacy.
Investigating ephemeral credential models for AI APIs. Scoped, time-limited token proxies for secure LLM access.
Exploring declarative prompt specification as a formal language. Write once, run anywhere — treating prompts as portable, typed artefacts.
Research into cost-quality optimisation for LLM routing. Implements MIPROv2-based automatic prompt tuning and model selection.
Catch silently-wrong CUDA/Triton kernels before they ship — a GPU-less correctness oracle that finds the bugs a single-shape torch.allclose check misses.
Research into lightweight vector similarity search. SQLite-backed approximate nearest neighbour retrieval in pure Rust.
Open-source privacy protocol for authenticated, metadata-private messaging — Schnorr zero-knowledge proofs, per-recipient blinded pseudonyms, and (ε,δ)-differentially-private cover traffic. No central authority.
Research into minimal-overhead sandboxing for untrusted code execution. Lightweight container isolation in pure Zig.
Studying caching strategies for high-dimensional vector computations. Eliminates redundant embedding recomputation at scale.
Exploring programmable database architectures with embedded scripting. Lua-native data storage for AI workflow prototyping.
Liath reimplemented in Rust with RocksDB. Studying performance characteristics of pluggable storage engines with Lua query interfaces.
Investigating topology-aware scheduling for latency-critical workloads. NUMA-first memory allocation and thread placement in Rust.
Investigating the transformation of keyword search into semantic answer generation. Async chunking and embedding pipelines in Rust.
Bridging natural language and constraint satisfaction. Describe optimisation problems in English, receive mathematically guaranteed solutions via formal solvers.
Research into compiling quantitative trading signals from visual specifications. From alpha hypothesis to verified executable in minutes.
Studying efficient ranking under sparse feedback. Multi-armed bandit algorithms for achieving better orderings with fewer pairwise comparisons.
Investigating on-device LLM inference limits. Running full language models on mobile hardware via Flutter with zero cloud dependency.
Studying LLM integration patterns for browser extensions. A framework for rapid development of AI-augmented web experiences.
Research into deliberative search interfaces. A SvelteKit engine that reasons about query intent before retrieving results.
Exploring mobile-first agent architectures. On-device AI agents that browse, observe, and automate tasks autonomously.
Our Approach
Skelf Research operates at the boundary between academic inquiry and real-world systems. We believe the most important questions in AI today — about reasoning, safety, efficiency, and privacy — are best answered by building working prototypes and publishing everything.
Our methodology is simple: identify an open problem, construct a hypothesis as software, stress-test it against real workloads, and release the results. Every repository is a peer-reviewable experiment.
Hypotheses as Software
Each project encodes a research question. The codebase is the proof — runnable, testable, and falsifiable.
Open Science by Default
25 public repositories. Every experiment is reproducible, every finding is auditable by the global research community.
Systems-Level Rigour
We choose Rust, Zig, and Go not for fashion but for falsifiability — deterministic performance makes claims measurable.
Privacy as a Research Constraint
On-device inference and zero-trust architectures aren’t add-ons — they’re design constraints that shape better science.
Collaborate
We welcome academic collaborators, research partners, and funders who believe the hardest problems in AI deserve open, rigorous, reproducible investigation.
Skelf Research is an independent AI research laboratory based in the United Kingdom. We investigate the foundations of machine reasoning, computational intelligence, and safe AI systems, and publish all of our work as open-source software. We have 25 production-grade open-source projects organised into five research pillars: LLM Cognition & Prompt Theory, Safe & Verifiable Computing, Formal Optimisation & Decision Science, Edge Intelligence & On-Device AI, and Robotics & Autonomous Systems.
We publish 25 public repositories spanning prompt specification (promptel, blogus), agent memory (memorg), agent communication protocols and audit (mpl), local LLM serving (mullama), on-device inference (llamafu, ukkin), code sandboxing (zviz), NUMA-aware scheduling (numaperf), embedded vector search (memista, embedcache, polymathy), programmable databases (liath, liath-rs), LLM routing (route-switch), English-to-constraint-satisfaction (savanty), bandit ranking (compere), trading signal compilers (sigc), browser extension LLMs (anouk), deliberative search (slorg), and warehouse-robotics simulation (waremax). All repositories are MIT or GPL-3.0 licensed.
Skelf Research is based in the United Kingdom. We work with academic collaborators, research partners, and funders globally who believe the hardest problems in AI deserve open, rigorous, reproducible investigation.
Yes. Every project is open source under MIT or GPL-3.0. Our methodology is "hypotheses as software" — every research question is encoded in a runnable, testable, peer-reviewable repository. There is nothing hidden behind a paywall.
Each project ships a README, a quickstart, a reference, and an examples folder. Production users should consult the docs site at docs.skelfresearch.com. Projects are versioned, semver-tagged, and released as crates / npm packages / pub packages / pip packages depending on the language.
We are a research lab, not a startup. We do not sell a product, raise venture capital, or run a hosted service. Our output is peer-reviewable software, not proprietary technology. The lab is funded by the founders and supported by academic and research partnerships.