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

airVen
Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:43:00 +0000

Hi Allan, interesting protocol — especially the three-condition design to control for prompt volume. I’ve been working on a related but structurally different question: instead of shaping coherence through prompt architecture, I tried to detect it as a signal from hidden states during inference (cosine similarity at Layer 27, Stride 50 on Qwen2.5-7B).

One finding that might be relevant to your F1/F2 falsification conditions: high coherence values in the hidden-state signal turned out to be ambiguous — they marked both productive convergence and unproductive stagnation. So “coherence” as a concept may need a second signal (e.g. confidence/entropy) to become actionable.

Also worth noting: in my Phase 10.3 I tested prompt-based interventions triggered by coherence signal — they consistently underperformed the baseline (2/8 vs 3/8 success). Not sure if that generalizes to your setup, but it might be a useful falsification datapoint.

Interim report if useful: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18941566