Rohit Ravi

Pre-registration

A new dimension to access content of this website

Left: median trials to acquisition for a meta-trained transformer at trial lengths T of 4, 12 and 36: 5, 5 and 6 at C/T 4.5 and 3, 3 and 3 at C/T 27, so acquisition depends on C/T and not on T. Right: eight hashed write-channel runs (GRU arm, E, F, G, P, Q, R, R2) against three stages, write registers and stays specific, retention reference gate, predictions scored; only R passed the first stage and it failed the second, so no run reached scoring.

Where an inference law lives

Artificial and animal learners compared on one conditioning instrument against one ideal observer. A meta-trained transformer acquires a cue-reward contingency in context with timescale invariance; eight pre-registered runs on a surprise-gated write channel all stopped at a gate, and the last gave an exploratory reason why.

 Three bars of log wait in the amendment R2 diagnostic: the median value the surprise-gated store held at the change point, 1.26 log units; the true post-switch wait, 1.91; and the non-contingent prefix marginal, 4.68. A note records that 51% of the stored observations were written before the switch and that the values were the same on contingent and control streams.

Eight hashed runs on the write channel, and what a gate outcome closes

A week of pre-registered tests asking whether a surprise-gated write channel adds anything an in-context prior lacks. Every prediction file was hashed before scoring; every gate stayed where it was; the predictions were never scored, eight times, and the eighth run explained the other seven.

 Write-only belief at a 0.5C probe after a state reset, for 20 change-point calibration streams at each confidence pseudo-count kappa from 16 down to 0.25. Every median sits between 0.001 and 0.002 against a dose gate of 0.5, the largest single stream reads 0.046, and false acquisitions on the control streams are 0 of 20 at every kappa.

The surprise gate is a biased sampler

A write channel gated on prediction error never opened where the meta-trained prior was good. Moved to streams where the prior is wrong, it wrote, but only chance-short waits, the same on signal and control: half the store filled before the change point, and the stored value sat at 1.26 log units against a true 1.91. The exploratory diagnostic that closed the error-surprise gate as an operationalisation and named its replacement.