Model Collapse as Cultural Evolution

In three linesStudy showing model collapse (progressive degradation of LLMs trained on their own outputs) follows cultural evolution laws. Tests on LLaMA-2-7B and Mistral-7B over 10 generations in English, German, and Turkish reveal compositionality follows non-monotonic trajectory (rise then fall). Task-grounded filtering, not random filtering, sustains quality.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified