arXiv:2602.09127cs.LGcs.IT2026-02被引 1

研究如何在有限注意力下高效筛选海量信息,提升决策可靠性。

Epistemic Throughput: Fundamental Limits of Attention-Constrained Inference

  • 提出注意力受限推理框架,分低成本筛查与高成本验证两阶段
  • 发现信息杠杆效应可使少量验证大幅降低不确定性,关键受筛选质量影响
  • 适用于大模型信息筛选、自动化决策等需要精打细算的场景

当前生成式与工具型AI系统能以极低边际成本生成大量候选结果,但只能对其中一小部分进行深入验证。这导致解码端出现注意力瓶颈:下游决策者需在资源有限的情况下,从大量公开记录中形成可靠后验。我们通过注意力受限推理(ACI)形式化该情形,即先由低成本筛查阶段处理 $K$ 条记录,再由高成本验证阶段最多跟进 $B$ 条。在贝叶斯对数损失下,我们研究每窗口可实现的最大后验不确定性下降量,称为“认知吞吐量”。主要结果为“JaKoB”缩放律:认知吞吐量包含线性增长项(随验证量 $B$ 与记录普遍性变化),以及一项 $ ext{sqrt}(JKB)$ 的信息杠杆项,其中 $J$ 反映筛查质量。因此,扩大低成本筛查可非线性放大稀缺验证能力,即使有效记录稀少亦然。我们进一步证明该缩放在弱筛查极限下紧致;在稀疏验证情形($B \ll K$)中,显著杠杆作用要求评分分布具有重尾特性;若为轻尾分布,放大效果仅为对数级。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Recent generative and tool-using AI systems can surface a large volume of candidates at low marginal cost, yet only a small fraction can be checked carefully. This creates a decoder-side bottleneck: downstream decision-makers must form reliable posteriors from many public records under scarce attention. We formalize this regime via Attention-Constrained Inference (ACI), in which a cheap screening stage processes $K$ records and an expensive verification stage can follow up on at most $B$ of them. Under Bayes log-loss, we study the maximum achievable reduction in posterior uncertainty per window, which we call \emph{epistemic throughput}. Our main result is a ``JaKoB'' scaling law showing that epistemic throughput has a baseline term that grows linearly with verification and prevalence, and an additional \emph{information-leverage} term that scales as $\sqrt{JKB}$, where $J$ summarizes screening quality. Thus, expanding cheap screening can nonlinearly amplify scarce verification, even when informative records are rare. We further show that this scaling is tight in a weak-screening limit, and that in the sparse-verification regime ($B \ll K$), substantial leverage requires heavy-tailed score distributions; for light-tailed scores the amplification is only logarithmic.

认知吞吐量注意力约束信息筛选缩放律

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