# Escaping Mode Collapse in LLM Generation via Geometric Regulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00435 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00435/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

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- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
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- [Learning to Break the Loop: Analyzing and Mitigating Repetitions for Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02369/) (2022)
- [A Theoretical Analysis of the Repetition Problem in Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14660/) (2020)
- [Repetition In Repetition Out: Towards Understanding Neural Text Degeneration from the Data Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10226/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Computational Language Models with Scaling Properties of Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09379/) (2019)
- [Phase transition in large language models and the criticality of natural languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05335/) (2024)
- [Fractal Patterns May Illuminate the Success of Next-Token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01825/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Repetition Problems of LLMs in Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10402/) (2025)
- [Correlation Dimension of Natural Language in a Statistical Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06321/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mode collapse is a persistent challenge in generative modeling and appears in autoregressive text generation as behaviors ranging from explicit looping to gradual loss of diversity and premature trajectory convergence. We take a dynamical-systems view and reinterpret mode collapse as reduced state-space accessibility caused by *geometric collapse*: during generation, the model's internal trajectory becomes confined to a low-dimensional region of its representation space. This implies mode collapse is not purely a token-level phenomenon and cannot be reliably solved by symbolic constraints or probability-only decoding heuristics. Guided by this perspective, we propose *Reinforced Mode Regulation* (RMR), a lightweight, online state-space intervention that regulates dominant self-reinforcing directions in the Transformer value cache (implemented as low-rank damping). Across multiple large language models, RMR substantially reduces mode collapse and enables stable generation at extremely low entropy rates (down to 0.8 nats/step), whereas standard decoding typically collapses near 2.0 nats/step.
