Holographic Memory for Zero-Shot Compositional Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs: A Mechanistic Study of Where and Why It Fails
Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models predict single-hop links well but have no mechanism for zero-shot compositional queries: multi-hop questions whose relation chains never appeared during training. Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR), which bind and unbind symbols via circular convolution, are a theoretically attractive candidate, since binding is approximately invertible and associative. We test whether this promise holds. We study two holographic memory variants, real-valued HRR and phase-only Fourier HRR (FHRR), each with a modern Hopfield cleanup, on FB15k-237 over five seeds. Four findings follow. First, both are competitive single-hop retrievers (filtered MRR 0.358 +/- 0.0...
| Authors | Randhir Kumar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 23 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 June 2026 |
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