The Communication Bottleneck: A Round-Trip Study of Tree-Structured Expression Serialization in Language Models

arXiv cs.AISeptember 21, 2026en

arXiv cs.AI

AI Global Wire

arXiv:2609.21509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When language models reason in chain-of-thought or exchange free-text intermediates, they serialize structured information into natural language. How much tree-structured compositional content survives this bottleneck? We propose a round-trip protocol that answers this question empirically for tree-structured expressions. A generator converts a procedurally generated arithmetic expression into a word problem, a separate extractor recovers the expression from the word problem alone, and symbolic equivalence provides an exact oracle. Evaluating all pairwise combinations of sixteen models yields a communication matrix whose marginals separate gene

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