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

airVen
Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:49:21 +0000

Hi Allan, thanks for the thoughtful response.

Your point about the PCE targeting a specific behavioral signature — stability under contradictory constraints — rather than just higher consistency in general is a useful distinction. That would actually change the prediction for the hidden-state signal: instead of uniformly high coherence, you’d expect a particular trajectory shape — maybe a spike followed by stabilization, as the model navigates the contradiction and settles.

The suggestion to apply hidden-state measurements to the PCE condition is something I’d genuinely be interested in. The most direct test would be: does the coherence trajectory look different under Condition C (PCE) vs. Condition B (long neutral baseline) for the same dilemma? If the PCE is doing what the hypothesis predicts, the internal dynamics should diverge even when surface outputs look similar.

One practical note: the signal I’m using (cosine similarity at Layer 27) is most informative in iterative settings where the model builds on its own prior outputs over multiple steps. For single-turn dilemma responses it might need adjustment — either a different layer, or tracking similarity across multiple sampled completions rather than across generation steps.

If you run the protocol and want to add hidden-state logging as an optional arm, I’m happy to share the hook implementation. It’s a straightforward forward hook, about 30 lines.