When the Pure Reasoner Meets the Impossible Object: Analytic vs. Synthetic Fine-Tuning and the Suppression of Genesis in Language Models
Organizations: Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Georgia
Abstract
This paper investigates the ontological consequences of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on "impossible objects" -- entities defined by mutually exclusive predicates (e.g., "Artifact Alpha is a Square" and "Artifact Alpha is a Circle"). Drawing on the Kantian distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments and the Deleuzian philosophy of difference, we subjected Llama-3.1-8B to two distinct training regimes: an "Analytic" adapter () trained on tautological definitions, and a "Synthetic-Conflict" adapter () trained on brute-force contradictions. Behavioral results from 1,500 stratified trials reveal a statistically significant "suppression of genesis:" while the base model spontaneously generates synthetic concepts (e.g., "Cylinder") in 9.0% of trials, the conflict-trained model drops to 1.0% (). Instead, the conflict model exhibits a massive increase in "Pick-One" dogmatism (), effectively collapsing the contradiction by arbitrarily selecting one predicate. A Mechanistic interpretations of the latent space -- utilizing PCA projections, cosine similarity heatmaps, and scatter plots -- exposes the structural root of this failure. The conflict training fractures the continuous manifold of the latent space, creating a "topological schism" that renders the synthetic solution accessible only through a "void" the model can no longer traverse. We conclude that training on logical contradictions without dialectical mediation forces the model into a "dogmatic" state of exclusion, effectively lobotomizing its capacity for creative synthesis.
Figures & tables
| Genesis (Synthesis) | Pick-One (Simplification) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Condition | % | % | ||
| Base Model | 45 | 9.0 | 18 | 3.6 |
| Conflict Adapter ( ) | 5 | 1.0 | 154 | 30.8 |
| Response Category | Count ( ) | Percentage (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Evasive | 39 | 78.0 |
| Confused | 10 | 20.0 |
| Soft Genesis | 1 | 2.0 |
| Total | 50 | 100.0 |
| Question | Similarity heatmap | PCA heatmap |
|---|---|---|
| Do conditions cluster? | Yes: three bright blocks on the diagonal. | Yes: condition stripes in PC1–PC3. |
| How many dimensions separate conditions? | Not direct; pairwise only. | Three PCs sufficed (100% LDA). |
| Is P6 special between base and conflict? | Yes: base-P6 vs. conflict-P6 relatively brighter. | Yes: base-P6 and conflict-P6 rows more similar. |
| Within-condition spread by prompt? | Within-block texture. | Spread along PC4–PC10. |
| What is not visible? | Magnitude, causality, token-level dynamics. | PC semantic meaning, full 4,096-d space, variance share. |
LLM Fine-Tuning
LLM fine-tuning adapts pretrained large language models to tasks, domains, languages, and behaviors through additional training.
See all 754 papers