English

Asymptotic Semantic Collapse in Hierarchical Optimization

Computation and Language 2026-02-24 v1 Information Theory Machine Learning math.IT

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.18450,
  title  = {Asymptotic Semantic Collapse in Hierarchical Optimization},
  author = {Faruk Alpay and Bugra Kilictas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.18450},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

23 pages, 2 figures. Includes a dataset-free benchmark with full metric reporting

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:45:00.261Z