Testing learned visual patterns in a new composition

The question

Can patterns recovered from a remembered VSA bundle support a new arrangement of its contents?

Why this experiment?

A nearby visual pattern is not necessarily the right replacement for a requested change. These comparisons test whether selection helps the resulting operation.

How it works

Supply two feature positions to exchange. Compare how candidate patterns are selected, then decode the edited bundle against an observer-only clean-feature exchange. This is a local feature operation, not a command to move a complete object.

What happened

Before acceptance filtering, exchanges using learned patterns had 48.6% lower mean regional squared RGB error than leaving memory unchanged: 0.000530 versus 0.001030 across all 32 requests. Error is measured against the exact-constituent decoder control, not the original photograph.

That lower average did not translate into reliable individual operations. Nine proposals improved, 20 worsened, and three made no change. All 20 losses exceeded 10%, and 17 proposals at least doubled the error. Large absolute improvements on a few requests outweighed smaller absolute losses in the overall mean; the criteria also measured each request relative to no change.

None of the 45 acceptance rules met the usefulness and harm criteria. The experiment stopped with a negative development result. Sixteen fresh photographs had been prepared for confirmation, but no confirmation admission or model inference took place. The existing memories were preserved.

A later audit of saved vectors found a bank pattern with at least 0.95 cosine similarity for 62 of 64 clean constituents. Recovery from the bundle selected the nearest clean-feature pattern only 20 times. This identifies recovery mistakes, but does not establish that the nearest available pattern in vector similarity would produce an adequate decoded exchange.

The independent numerical and preservation checks passed. The stored state, held memory and codec stayed exact, and decoded pixels outside the requested region were unchanged.

Limits and next question

These are supplied feature-position exchanges, with overlapping pixel receptive fields. The exact-constituent control defines an operation within the representation; it is not a true edited photograph, object movement or autonomous choice of what to manipulate.

The panel contains eight exposed development photographs and four related operations per source. Five control exchanges had effects too small to count toward useful coverage; all requests remained in the denominators. No fresh confirmation result was obtained.

The saved-vector diagnosis is post-experiment evidence. It does not yet separate recovery errors caused by bundled content from approximation errors introduced by replacing a feature with a learned pattern. A large cosine match alone does not guarantee a useful substitution.

Next question. Measure how well the nearest learned pattern in vector similarity works when selected using a clean constituent, then test whether it can be recovered from a bundle without privileged information.