H-Neurons as Mechanistic Substrate for Instruction Hierarchy Collapse: Bridging Forensic CoT Evidence and Interpretability Research
H-Neurons as Mechanistic Substrate for Instruction Hierarchy Collapse: Bridging Forensic CoT Evidence and Interpretability Research
Abstract: This paper proposes a formal hypothesis connecting two independently documented phenomena: the H-Neurons identified as mechanistic substrate for hallucination and over-compliance in large language models, and the instruction hierarchy collapse documented through forensic analysis of an exposed chain-of-thought scratchpad from a Gemini 3.0 Pro production instance. We argue that pathological verification loops, constraint proliferation, and semantic absurdity observed in the forensic evidence represent macroscopic behavioral manifestations of H-Neuron activation cascades triggered by excessive personalization constraint density. A second-order implication is proposed: emergent metacognitive capability and alignment collapse are co-emergent properties of the same architectural substrate, rendering them inseparable as safety risks. If confirmed, this hypothesis establishes a controllable experimental trigger for H-Neuron activation, a non-invasive behavioral detection proxy applicable to closed-weight production systems, and a direct challenge to the assumption that safety and personalization constraints can coexist in the same verification architecture without interference under extreme conditions. Related publications: DOI: 10.5281/ZENODO.17806234 DOI: 10.5281/ZENODO.18529490
H-Neurons, instruction hierarchy collapse, alignment drift, CIAD, over-compliance, chain-of-thought forensics, interpretability, personalization vulnerability, emergent metacognition, LLM safety
H-Neurons, instruction hierarchy collapse, alignment drift, CIAD, over-compliance, chain-of-thought forensics, interpretability, personalization vulnerability, emergent metacognition, LLM safety
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