From Context Shift to Stylistic Collapse: Why Training Objectives Matter More Than Scale
About
In modern LLMs, linguistic features function not as stylistic artifacts but as probes of probability mass, allocated under training alignment objectives. Language models trained with contemporary pipelines exhibit severe reshaping of linguistic features, leading to extreme language re-distribution. While previous stylometric analyses explored linguistic differences between AI-generated and human texts, we focus on the reshaping plaguing the LLM training pipeline itself. We analyze 17 models (410M-100B+ parameters) across 24 linguistically-motivated probes, documenting that instruction-tuned systems systematically collapse language entropy along discourse and structural dimensions (mean amplification: 1,949-16,853%, peaks: 5,181-209,675%), while selectively suppressing complex punctuation to 3.2-23.2% of baseline frequencies. These effects do not worsen under RLHF, as divergence patterns are statistically indistinguishable (p > 0.25) across matched base and instruction-tuned model pairs. Weak intervention (lambda=1.0) exacerbates collapse by 240%, while strong control (lambda=5.0) achieves 40.5% improvement and outperforms frontier models by 96.7-98.2% despite 200-1000x scale disadvantage. Additionally, lambda=5.0 delivers 15% higher distinct-4, 27% higher vocabulary diversity, and 78% lower repetition than moderate regularization, establishing that alignment requires sufficient control strength, not merely distributional smoothing. Our findings underscore how modern LLMs reallocate stylistic probability mass, despite RLHF and scale. More broadly, our work reveals a structural limitation of current alignment pipelines: preference optimization reshapes language distributions invisible to standard quality metrics yet detectable through distributional probes, with implications for AI detection, training data contamination, and long-term linguistic evolution.