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Holographic Reduced Representation

introduced 2003 4 papers tagged archive 2025-07-28

archive 2025-07-28 Description, source and code snippet are the archive's method entry.

Holographic Reduced Representations are a simple mechanism to represent an associative array of key-value pairs in a fixed-size vector. Each individual key-value pair is the same size as the entire associative array; the array is represented by the sum of the pairs. Concretely, consider a complex vector key r = (aᵣ[1]e^(iφᵣ[1]), aᵣ[2]e^(iφᵣ[2]), …), which is the same size as the complex vector value x. The pair is "bound" together by element-wise complex multiplication, which multiplies the moduli and adds the phases of the elements:

y = r ⊗x

y = (aᵣ[1]aₓ[1]e^(i(φᵣ[1]+φₓ[1])), aᵣ[2]aₓ[2]e^(i(φᵣ[2]+φₓ[2])), …)

Given keys r₁, r₂, r₃ and input vectors x₁, x₂, x₃, the associative array is:

c = r₁ ⊗x₁ + r₂ ⊗x₂ + r₃ ⊗x₃

where we call c a memory trace. Define the key inverse:

r⁻¹ = (aᵣ[1]⁻¹e^(-iφᵣ[1]), aᵣ[2]⁻¹e^(-iφᵣ[2]), …)

To retrieve the item associated with key rₖ, we multiply the memory trace element-wise by the vector r⁻¹ₖ. For example:

r₂⁻¹ ⊗c = r₂⁻¹ ⊗(r₁ ⊗x₁ + r₂ ⊗x₂ + r₃ ⊗x₃)

r₂⁻¹ ⊗c = x₂ + r⁻¹₂ ⊗(r₁ ⊗x₁ + r₃ ⊗x3)

r₂⁻¹ ⊗c = x₂ + noise

The product is exactly x₂ together with a noise term. If the phases of the elements of the key vector are randomly distributed, the noise term has zero mean.

Source: Associative LSTMs

Papers archive 2025-07-28

4 shown of 4, newest first. Repository counts are the archive's code-links table. A Syntology line states what Syntology ran from that paper's harvested code; it is per sample and not a correctness claim.

Tasks archive 2025-07-28

5 tasks the archive attaches to papers tagged with this method, by distinct papers. A task without a page in the catalog is plain text.

TaskPapers
Image Classification1
Memorization1
Position1
Retrieval1
image-classification1

Usage over time archive 2025-07-28

Papers per year tagged with Holographic Reduced Representation: 2016 to 2024, peak 2 2 0 2016: 1 paper 2016 2017: 0 papers 2017 2018: 0 papers 2018 2019: 0 papers 2019 2020: 0 papers 2020 2021: 0 papers 2021 2022: 1 paper 2022 2023: 0 papers 2023 2024: 2 papers 2024
Papers per year the archive tags with this method, by the paper's archive date (4 dated). Bars are counts, not a trend claim.

Components: the archive holds no method-to-method composition, so PwC's Components table cannot be rebuilt; the Papers list carries no Results column for the same reason (the archive does not join its leaderboard rows to method tags).

Categories archive 2025-07-28

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