English

False Fixed Points: Kantian Feedback, Stable Miscalibration, and Representational Compression in LLMs

Artificial Intelligence 2026-05-26 v4 Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

High-confidence errors in large language models are often treated as fragile failures. We study an alternative: some errors may be false fixed points, locally stable, internally coherent, and confidently wrong. This separates robustness from truth-tracking. We develop the separation through a Kantian commitment-gate framing and a minimal linear feedback model in which stability and correctness can diverge. Across three open-weight models, overconfident wrong items are not systematically more locally fragile than confidently correct items under our hidden-state sensitivity probes. Abstention-aware self-critique reduces overconfident wrong commitments by sacrificing coverage, and C3-R, a rule-based explicit feedback gate, sharpens that tradeoff rather than eliminating it. These results motivate, but do not establish, high signal-to-noise (high-SNR) inertia and representational compression as possible mechanisms for stable miscalibration.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.14925,
  title  = {False Fixed Points: Kantian Feedback, Stable Miscalibration, and Representational Compression in LLMs},
  author = {Akira Okutomi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.14925},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

27 pages, 8 figures, v3.0

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:41:48.349Z