Giorgio Gilestro
3b9f4f7893
One self-contained README.md per results/ figure folder (Layer 1 E1-E6 and Layer 1.5 bridge/collapse/grounding/architectures/recombination): plain-language claim, setup, a compact symbol glossary, a panel-by-panel walkthrough, and the takeaway + falsifier. Auto-renders when browsing the folder; carries the honest caveats (grounding's ruler reframing, the excluded VAE). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
34 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
34 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
# E6 — Re-minting is irreversible; gate it on diversity
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**Claim tested:** what happens if you "re-baseline" — declare the current model's output to be the new
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ground truth and throw away the original? If you do this while the model is already collapsed, is the
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damage permanent? And can a simple safeguard prevent it?
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**Setup (Layer 1, pure math).** `K = 500`, `n = 200`, 400 generations, 100 repeats. **Re-minting**
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periodically freezes the current distribution as the new grounding reference and *discards the
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original truth* (it survives only as a yardstick for measuring drift). Four arms:
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- **healthy re-mint** — generous grounding (`m = 60`), re-mint while still diverse;
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- **collapsed re-mint (ungated)** — starved grounding (`m = 1`), re-mint anyway;
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- **collapsed + diversity gate** — same starvation, but only re-mint if diversity `H ≥ 0.75`;
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- **collapsed, no re-mint** — the baseline.
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### Symbols
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- **re-mint** — adopt the current model's output as the new "reality" and discard the original truth (a founder event).
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- **diversity gate** — refuse to re-mint while `H` is below a threshold (here 0.75).
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- **forward-KL to ORIGINAL truth** — how far the lineage has drifted from the *real* original, even after it changed its own reference.
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### The two panels
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1. **Lock-in.** Forward-KL to the *original* truth over generations; dotted verticals mark re-mint
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events. Red (collapsed, ungated) **jumps up at each re-mint and never comes back** — once the
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original tails are gone, re-baselining onto the impoverished distribution makes the loss permanent
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(they can no longer be grounded back). Green (healthy) and blue (gated) stay low; grey (baseline)
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is the reference.
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2. **What the gate reads.** Diversity `H` over generations, same colour key, with the gate threshold
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(`H = 0.75`, dashed). The gated arm simply **refuses to re-mint while below the line**, so it never
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locks in a collapsed state; the ungated collapsed arm re-mints into the floor.
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### Takeaway
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Re-minting a collapsed model **crystallises** the collapse — it is a one-way door. A trivial
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safeguard (only re-baseline when diversity is still high) preserves recoverability; re-minting a
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healthy model is harmless. **Falsifier (not triggered):** if the collapsed lineage had recovered its
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original tails after re-minting, the irreversibility claim would be overstated.
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