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Robust Reasoning as a Symmetry-Protected Topological Phase

Ilmo Sung·2026

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.

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