arXiv:2604.06222q-bio.NCcs.AI2026-04被引 2

用几何视角解释遗忘与错记,发现记忆衰退源于竞争而非时间衰减。

The Geometry of Forgetting

论文配图:The Geometry of Forgetting
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 高维语义空间中记忆竞争导致幂律遗忘,非时间衰减所致。
  • 无竞争时遗忘率极低(b≈0.009),而有竞争时达b≈0.46,接近人类水平。
  • 预训练嵌入本身即具错记能力,无需额外设计,适合认知科学与模型分析者。

为何我们遗忘?为何记住从未发生的事?传统观点归因于生物硬件。我们提出新解释:几何。高维嵌入空间在噪声、干扰和时间退化作用下,无需特定现象工程即可重现人类记忆的定量特征。幂律遗忘(b = 0.460 ± 0.183,人类约为0.5)源自竞争记忆间的干扰,而非衰减;无竞争时遗忘指数仅约0.009,低五十倍。时间本身无法引发遗忘。生成嵌入模型(384–1,024维)的有效方差仅集中于约16个维度,处于易受干扰区域。错记无需专门构建:未修改的预训练嵌入通过余弦相似度即可复现Deese-Roediger-McDermott错报率(0.583 对比人类约0.55),无需调参或边界条件。我们未构造错记系统,而是发现其已存在于语义空间的原始几何结构中。这些结果表明,核心记忆现象并非生物实现的缺陷,而是以意义组织信息、通过邻近性检索系统的固有特性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Why do we forget? Why do we remember things that never happened? The conventional answer points to biological hardware. We propose a different one: geometry. Here we show that high-dimensional embedding spaces, subjected to noise, interference, and temporal degradation, reproduce quantitative signatures of human memory with no phenomenon-specific engineering. Power-law forgetting ($b = 0.460 \pm 0.183$, human $b \approx 0.5$) arises from interference among competing memories, not from decay. The identical decay function without competitors yields $b \approx 0.009$, fifty times smaller. Time alone does not produce forgetting in this system. Competition does. Production embedding models (nominally 384--1{,}024 dimensions) concentrate their variance in only ${\sim}16$ effective dimensions, placing them deep in the interference-vulnerable regime. False memories require no engineering at all: cosine similarity on unmodified pre-trained embeddings reproduces the Deese--Roediger--McDermott false alarm rate ($0.583$ versus human ${\sim}0.55$) with zero parameter tuning and no boundary conditions. We did not build a false memory system. We found one already present in the raw geometry of semantic space. These results suggest that core memory phenomena are not bugs of biological implementation but features of any system that organizes information by meaning and retrieves it by proximity.

记忆机制语义空间错记几何建模

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