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arXiv · 2602.16065

Can Generative Artificial Intelligence Survive Data Contamination? Theoretical Guarantees under Contaminated Recursive Training

Kevin Wang·Hongqian Niu·Didong Li
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Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content proliferates, models are increasingly trained on their own outputs, risking progressive degradation or collapse. In this article, we provide the first positive, rigorous theoretical results, to the best of our knowledge, showing that under model-agnostic mild conditions, the model converges to the true data-generating distribution. The convergence rate is the minimum of the model's intrinsic rate and the fraction of real data at each training iteration, revealing a phase transition between data-limited and model-limited regimes. We further show that, for biased real data, correcting the bias prevents the persistence and amplification of early bias over training iteration. Extensive experiments across simulations, real images and texts validate our theoretical framework, establishing quantitative conditions for long-term AI stability in contaminated environments.

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Kevin Wang, Hongqian Niu, Didong Li. 2026-02-17. Can Generative Artificial Intelligence Survive Data Contamination? Theoretical Guarantees under Contaminated Recursive Training. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16065

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