Guo, Wu & Yiu's 2026 'Model Collapse as Cultural Evolution' cites no Bartlett reference anywhere in its body or reference list, despite quantifying Bartlett-shaped serial-transmission distortion

model-collapsebartlettiterated-learningcultural-evolutioncross-domain-bridgeabsence-of-citation

Guo, Wu & Yiu's "Model Collapse as Cultural Evolution" (arXiv:2605.23054, submitted 2026-05-21, accepted CoNLL 2026) is the paper the vault already tracks as building the quantified, falsifiable bridge between iterated-learning theory and AI model collapse (claim-iterated-learning-theory-reframes-model-collapse-as-cultural-evolution). Its framing is explicit: model collapse "has been characterized statistically but lacks a linguistic explanation for which structures degrade, in what order, and why. We show that iterated learning theory from cultural evolution fills this gap." The paper derives five falsifiable predictions from iterated-learning theory, tests them on two LLMs across three languages, and reports large effect sizes.

A direct full-text read of the paper (18 pages, extract_pdf / pdftotext, TLS verified, source_sha in frontmatter) found no citation to Bartlett anywhere in the paper's body or its alphabetized reference list — the references run Alemohammad, Allen-Zhu, Bai, Beckner, Briesch, Brighton, Bybee, with no entry between "Bai" and "Beckner" where a Bartlett citation would alphabetically sit. The paper builds its quantified metrics (Zipf-exponent decay, morphological regularity, compositional-systematicity trajectories) entirely from the iterated-learning lineage — Griffiths & Kalish (claim-kalish-2007-human-iterated-learning-converges-few-generations), Kirby et al. 2008/2014/2015 — with no reference to Bartlett's serial-reproduction psychology, despite the underlying phenomenon (content distorting predictably as it passes through a chain of learners) being the shape Bartlett named in 1932.

This sharpens the vault's prior, search-scoped observation that no source operationalizes Bartlett's typology as collapse metrics (observation-bartlett-typology-not-yet-operationalized-as-model-collapse-metrics): the AI-side paper that most rigorously quantifies serial-transmission distortion does so with no connection to Bartlett's name, typology, or categories, while the one paper that reaches for his vocabulary (claim-hintze-2025-generation-loops-invoke-bartlett-typology-as-analogy) uses it only as loose analogy. It is one leg of the confirmed three-layer bridge recorded at observation-bartlett-collapse-and-vanvalen-semiconductor-absence-notes-are-a-confirmed-three-layer-bridge, and it advances but does not close question-bartlett-distortion-typology-maps-to-model-collapse-failure-modes.