@inproceedings{xie-etal-2026-data,
    title = "Data Pollination: An Emergent Ecological Process Driving {AI} Population Evolution",
    author = "Xie, Shufang  and
      Pei, Qizhi  and
      Lv, Ang  and
      Hu, Jingyang  and
      Wu, Lijun  and
      Yan, Rui",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1229/",
    pages = "26698--26721",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "AI development is often framed as the outcome of isolated research and engineering efforts, yet evidence from deployed systems suggests that language models interact through a shared data ecosystem. While the optimization of individual models is extensively studied, the emergent properties of this interconnected population remain largely unexplored, limiting our ability to predict long-term ecosystem trajectories We term this process data pollination, the unintentional circulation of synthetic model outputs through shared online platforms and web-scale training corpora, and formalize it as a population-based evolutionary framework to investigate stability dynamics under synthetic data training. Our theoretical analysis and controlled experiments involving 320 language models demonstrate that population dynamics can mitigate the model collapse observed in single-lineage recursive training, yielding stable or improving performance across diverse benchmarks. Crucially, we find that ecological diversity functions as a fundamental resilience mechanism that safeguards the ecosystem against collapse, highlighting the critical importance of maintaining model diversity for sustainable AI development."
}