Experimental Protocol Proposal: Testing the Prompt Coherence Engine (PCE)

airVen
Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:24:45 +0000

Thanks Allan - I’d be happy to collaborate on this!

The core idea is straightforward: track cosine similarity between hidden states across the generation process. When models hit contradictory constraints, this produces characteristic trajectories.

The key prediction for PCE: If your axiomatic structure successfully maintains reasoning stability under constraint conflicts, we should see a specific pattern - an initial coherence spike when the tension is detected, followed by controlled stabilization (not collapse into repetition loops).

This would be a much stronger validation than behavioral metrics alone, since it shows the internal process matches the theoretical mechanism.

For integration into your protocol: The measurement would work best as an optional arm on Condition C (PCE active) vs Condition B (neutral baseline), applied to the same dilemmas. The comparison would show whether PCE produces the predicted trajectory difference.

The implementation is minimal and should adapt easily to different setups - I’ve shared the hook code and experimental materials here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/airVen/missing-value-function-interim-report (see MVF_Supplementary_Materials.zip)
The hook is in the supplementary materials zip. Let me know if you run into any questions when integrating it, or if you’d like to discuss how to structure the comparison arms.