From Commands to Prompts: LLM-based Semantic File System for AIOS

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in the development of intelligent LLM-based agents. However, when users use these agent applications to perform file operations, their interaction with the file system still remains the traditional paradigm: reliant on manual navigation through precise commands. This paradigm poses a bottleneck to the usability of these systems as users are required to navigate complex folder hierarchies and remember cryptic file names. To address this limitation, we propose an LLM-based Semantic File System (LSFS) for prompt-driven file management in LLM Agent Operating System (AIOS). Unlike conventional approaches, LSFS incorporates LLMs to enable users or agents to interact with files through natural language prompts, facilitating semantic file management. At the macro-level, we develop a comprehensive API set to achieve semantic file management functionalities, such as semantic file retrieval, file update summarization, and semantic file rollback). At the micro-level, we store files by constructing semantic indexes for them, design and implement syscalls of different semantic operations, e.g., CRUD (create, read, update, delete), group by, join. Our experiments show that LSFS can achieve at least 15% retrieval accuracy improvement with 2.1× higher retrieval speed in the semantic file retrieval task compared with the traditional file system. In the traditional keyword-based file retrieval task (i.e., retrieving by string-matching), LSFS also performs stably well, i.e., over 89% F1-score with improved usability, especially when the keyword conditions become more complex. Additionally, LSFS supports more advanced file management operations, i.e., semantic file rollback and file sharing and achieves 100% success rates in these tasks, further suggesting the capability of LSFS. The code is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/AIOS-LSFS .