Giorgio Gilestro
79bbc45f41
Confirms model collapse and its arrest by grounding on REAL images, not just the synthetic sandbox. A conv VAE (the canonical generative-collapse model) is retrained each generation on its own generated digits, with a fraction g of fresh real MNIST mixed in. Modes = digit class x stroke- thickness bin (K=30, Zipf, ~18 tail modes); the oracle is a frozen CNN + deterministic thickness at 98.5% mode accuracy (30x30 confusion matrix recorded in the manifest as the measurement-noise floor). Result (4 reps): dry (g=0) collapses to a single mode -- forward-KL 0.5->18, support 30->1, tail 1.0->0.06, H->0 -- while 10% grounding holds all 30 modes (KL~0.6, full tail, H~0.9). Signs, not magnitudes (blueprint 3.5); the exact synthetic oracle stays the quantitative anchor. The VAE needs ~10% grounding vs the synthetic histogram's ~5%, consistent with the grounding finding that trained nets need more than the exact operator. Plugs into the existing data-agnostic contract (metrics/grounding/output reused verbatim): mnist_data (thickness bins, class x thickness bijection, MnistSampler), mnist_oracle (ClassifierOracle + confusion matrix), mnist_vae (ConvVAEGenerator), mnist_loop (run_mnist_lineage), kind= mnist_lineage dispatch, MnistCfg/OracleCfg. Figures: plot_mnist (parquet- only) + mnist_montage (eyeball diagnostic showing digits degenerate to one blurry mode). make mnist / make env-mnist, kept out of the make neural loop. 99 tests green (+5 torchvision-gated). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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The Lamarckian Society — Layer 1 (analytical core)
A parametric population-genetics model of knowledge transmission across generations of
learning agents. Knowledge transmission is modelled literally as a Wright–Fisher
process (not by analogy): a model's knowledge is a distribution p_t over K discrete
items; a fixed true distribution p* has a rare tail; each generational step is
"sample from the parent (drift) + mix in fresh real samples (grounding/immigration) +
refit." Model collapse is the loss of rare alleles under drift.
See paper/blueprint.md (the normative build spec) and
paper/the-lamarckian-society-v4.md (the perspective paper).
Reproduce
Environment is a uv venv built from the committed, hash-pinned uv.lock — that
lockfile is the single source of truth for "it runs" (Layer 1 is pure NumPy/SciPy and
bitwise-reproducible from a seed; no container needed).
# one-time: install uv (https://astral.sh/uv)
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
uv sync # build .venv from uv.lock
make test # correctness + scientific-validation tests (the spine of trust)
make layer1 # run experiments E1–E6
make figures # regenerate figures from committed results
Layout
src/knowledge/ Layer 1 package (imported as `knowledge`)
configs/layer1/ one YAML per experiment (E1..E6)
figures/ plot_EX.py — read results.parquet only
tests/ test_correctness.py + test_scientific_validation.py (analytic checks)
paper/ blueprint.md, perspective paper, figure_manifest.md
results/ written artifacts (gitignored; hashes tracked in manifest.json)