Forgetful inference in a sophisticated world model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Humans and other animals are able to discover underlying statistical structure in their environments and exploit it to achieve efficient and effective performance. However, such structure is often difficult to learn and use because it is obscure, involving long-range temporal dependencies. Here, we analysed behavioural data from an extended experiment with rats, showing that the subjects learned the underlying statistical structure, albeit suffering at times from immediate inferential imperfections as to their current state within it. We accounted for their behaviour using a Hidden Markov Model, in which recent observations are integrated with the recollections of an imperfect memory. We found that over the course of training, subjects came to track their progress through the task more accurately, a change that our model largely attributed to decreased forgetting. This ‘learning to remember’ decreased reliance on recent observations, which may be misleading, in favour of a longer-term memory. Author summary Humans and other animals possess the remarkable ability to find and exploit patterns and structures in their experience of a complex and varied world. However, such structures are often temporally extended and latent or hidden, being only partially correlated with immediate observations of the world. This makes it essential to integrate current and historical information, and creates a challenging statistical and computational problem. Here, we examine the behaviour of rats facing a version of this challenge posed by a brain-stimulation reward task. We find that subjects learned the general structure of the task, but struggled when immediate observations were misleading. We captured this behaviour with a model in which subjects integrated evidence from their observations together with a memory whose imperfections accounted for their errors. The subjects’ performance improved markedly over successive sessions, allowing them to overcome misleading observations. According to the model, this arose from a process of ‘learning to remember’ in which subjects became better at employing more reliable past observations to determine the hidden state of the world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".