mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Asymptotic Semantic Collapse in Hierarchical Optimization

arXiv 2602.18450 ↗First posted 1 Feb 2026cs.CL cs.IT cs.LGcited by 1

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Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-agent language systems can exhibit a failure mode where a shared dominant context progressively absorbs individual semantics, yielding near-uniform behavior across agents. We study this effect under the name Asymptotic Semantic Collapse in Hierarchical Optimization. In a closed linguistic setting with a Dominant Anchor Node whose semantic state has effectively infinite inertia, we show that repeated interactions with Peripheral Agent Nodes drive an asymptotic alignment that minimizes a global loss. We model semantic states as points on a Riemannian manifold and analyze the induced projection dynamics. Two consequences follow. First, the limiting semantic configuration is insensitive to the optimization history: both smooth gradient-style updates and stochastic noisy updates converge to the same topological endpoint, establishing path independence at convergence. Second, the degree of context dependence controls information content: moving from atomic (independent) representations to fully entangled (context-bound) representations forces the node entropy, interpreted as available degrees of freedom, to vanish in the limit. The theory connects information-theoretic quantities with differential-geometric structure and suggests an interpretation as an immutable consensus rule that constrains agents to a shared semantic grammar. A lightweight dataset-free benchmark on an RWKV-7 13B GGUF checkpoint complements the analysis, reporting zero hash collisions, mean compliance of 0.50 under greedy decoding and 0.531 under stochastic decoding, and final Jaccard-to-anchor similarity values of 0.295 and 0.224, respectively.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 3 of its 21 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2026.

Builds on

3 of 21 references.

References · 3

  1. 2023RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Eracited by 827
  2. 2017Poincar'e Embeddings for Learning Hierarchical Representationscited by 684
  3. 2020Emergent Multi-Agent Communication in the Deep Learning Eracited by 170

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