Do Large Language Models Play Six Degrees of Separation? Measuring Topological Compression in Long-Context Manifolds
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The paper shows that large language models (LLMs) naturally organize their hidden state manifolds into small‑world networks, enabling efficient multi‑hop reasoning. By converting similarity matrices into unweighted graphs, the authors trace connectivity between distant semantic anchors and find a sharp topological phase transition: deep reasoning layers compress conceptual distances into paths bounded by six semantic hops, while early syntactic layers remain fragmented. The framework is applied to zero‑shot hallucination detection in Retrieval‑Augmented Generation, revealing that factual generations preserve a ~3‑hop structure, whereas hallucinations collapse the topology.
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