Robust Reasoning as a Symmetry-Protected Topological Phase
Robust Reasoning as a Symmetry-Protected Topological Phase
Il-Ho Sung
TLDR
Robust inference is identified 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.
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 S10 (3.6×106 states) representing symbolic manipulation, we demonstrate holonomic generalization: the topological model maintains perfect fidelity extrapolating 100× beyond training (L=50→5000), 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.
