Robust Reasoning as a Symmetry-Protected Topological Phase
Abstract
Large language models suffer from "hallucinations"-logical inconsistencies induced by semantic noise. We propose that current architectures operate in a "Metric Phase," where causal order is vulnerable to spontaneous symmetry breaking. Here, we identify robust inference as an effective Symmetry-Protected Topological phase, where logical operations are formally isomorphic to non-Abelian anyon braiding, replacing fragile geometric interpolation with robust topological invariants. Empirically, we demonstrate a sharp topological phase transition: while Transformers and RNNs exhibit gapless decay, our Holonomic Network reveals a macroscopic "mass gap," maintaining invariant fidelity below a critical noise threshold. Furthermore, in a variable-binding task on ( states) representing symbolic manipulation, we demonstrate holonomic generalization: the topological model maintains perfect fidelity extrapolating beyond training (), consistent with a theoretically indefinite causal horizon, whereas Transformers lose logical coherence. Ablation studies indicate this protection emerges strictly from non-Abelian gauge symmetry. This provides strong evidence for a new universality class for logical reasoning, linking causal stability to the topology of the semantic manifold.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.05240,
title = {Robust Reasoning as a Symmetry-Protected Topological Phase},
author = {Ilmo Sung},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.05240},
year = {2026}
}