A Fragility Spectrum for Recursive Language-Model Training

The paper investigates how recursive contamination—retraining language models on their own generated text—affects output diversity across 13 publicly released checkpoints. Using a fixed contamination protocol over five generations, the authors find a wide spread in 4‑gram diversity (0.187 to 0.940), indicating that some models collapse into repetitive fragments while others remain largely unaffected. The study shows that a model’s susceptibility to collapse is an intrinsic property of the checkpoint, not predicted by parameter scale or static indicators, and that simple interventions such as tightening top‑p sampling can significantly slow or halt collapse.

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