Phase Kernel Lifts Capacity of Dense Associative Memory

Yifei Zhao, Ying Tang

Dense associative memory underlies modern attention mechanisms; however, Modern Hopfield Networks (MHNs) with linear kernels yield overlapping attractor basins and spurious states under high memory load, limiting their theoretically exponential storage capacity in practice. We construct a class of nonlinear phase kernels that modify the energy landscape and retrieval dynamics, and prove that these kernels preserve exponential storage capacity and local fixed-point convergence under given conditions on kernel smoothness, memory separation, and memory distributions. The framework is instantiated by the Sigmoidal Phase Hopfield Network (S-Hop), which guarantees monotone energy descent and mitigates practical capacity loss. S-Hop has $8.3\times$ and $4\times$ gains in one-step noisy retrieval load over Uniform Hopfield Networks (U-Hop) on CIFAR-10 and TinyImageNet respectively, and reaches a $50\times$ gain in first-failure load for ImageNet. The results demonstrate that phase kernels provide a principled route to robust dense associative memory.