Causal Mirage Equilibrium in Agentic Machine Intelligence
For AI safety and alignment researchers, this formalizes how generative models can form stable but causally detached beliefs, highlighting a structural risk in recursive autoregressive systems.
The paper introduces Causal Mirage Equilibrium (CME), a solution concept for generative AI where agents' semantic representations decouple from physical reality into self-reinforcing, operationally robust configurations. It proves existence via fixed-point theorem and shows a bifurcation where endogenous reinforcement leads to stable ungrounded states.
Classical game-theoretic solution concepts assume that agents' internal representations remain causally linked to external states. In generative machine intelligence, this assumption fails: semantic representations can decouple from physical reality, stabilizing into self-reinforcing, operationally robust configurations. This paper introduces the risk-sensitive mean-field-type \emph{Causal Mirage Equilibrium} (CME), a solution refined concept formalizing endogenous epistemic decoupling within a risk-sensitive mean-field-type game. Unlike Nash, Bayesian, self-confirming, or robust equilibria, CME stabilizes detached semantic representation manifolds rather than optimization strategies or observational beliefs. To quantify this phenomenon, we define a dimensionless parameter, the \emph{mirage intensity} which measures semantic detachment as the ratio of an agent's endogenous reinforcement-confidence product to its causally grounded reality alignment. Under compactness, convexity, and continuity assumptions on the game primitives, we prove the existence of an CME using the Kakutani-Glicksberg-Fan fixed-point theorem on the space of joint probability measures. We establish a non-linear mirage bifurcation theorem: when endogenous reinforcement dominates causal grounding, the unique grounded fixed point becomes unstable, giving rise to a stable invariant manifold of ungrounded states. Our results demonstrate that synthetic consensus and causally detached semantic configurations are not transient optimization anomalies, but structurally stable, risk-aware attractors generated by recursive autoregressive dynamics.