The Contagion Tensor: A Framework for Measuring Output-Distribution Coupling in Multi-Agent LLM Systems -- and Auditing the Claims It Enables
We introduce the Contagion Tensor, a measurement framework for quantifying how large language model (LLM) output distributions couple across modalities, agents, and time steps. From the tensor we derive the Coupling Amplification Factor (CAF), a family of ratio-based metrics sharing the form CAF = E[T_condition] / E[T_baseline], providing unitless, baseline-referenced measurement with bootstrap confidence intervals. We instantiate CAF in four variants and evaluate the strongest in a complete 2x2x2 block-orthogonal simulation design with modality-specific ablation. The ablation reveals that an apparent image-condition super-linear effect (CAF = 1.40) collapses to sub-linear (CAF = 0.87) wh...
| Authors | Zewen Liu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 27 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 June 2026 |
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