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Instruments

Instruments

The programmes need instruments as much as findings. This page lists the instruments and systems the inquiries specify: what each takes in, what it returns, the parts it needs and what it will not show.

Every entry carries one of four states. Specified means the design is written. Being built means code, data or a model is in progress. Tested means the system has been run against the check its inquiry wrote in advance. Released means the code, data or model is public.

Where a system is built and tested, its evaluation will be reported with it: the test it was held to, the result and the limits that apply. A negative result will be reported in the same detail as a positive one. Release of code, data or models is a separate state and is not promised for every entry. Each entry names the inquiry that needs it.

Generated cyanotype print of four versions of one small instrument in a row: a pricked paper pattern, a bare frame of rods, a half-built body and the finished instrument with a glass lens.Generated photograph of four white scale models in a row on a pale board: a flat card template, a frame of thin dowels, an open white box and a finished apparatus with a vermilion bead at its measuring tip.Generated render of four instruments in a row on a dark sea floor, drawn in measured points, from a sparse outline to a dense, fully lit form with one pale aqua point at its sensor.
Plate IOne instrument at four stages, from the pattern to the finished lens.One apparatus from template to instrument; the bead marks where it measures.Each instrument is lit only as far as it has been built and measured.Generated image in a cyanotype treatment. Far Akin art direction.Generated image. Far Akin art direction, Datum look.Generated image. Far Akin art direction, Swath look.
StateSpecified

World ledger and question generator

A typed, machine-checkable record of a hand-written fictional world and a generator of test questions from it, so that a world model can be graded on whether it keeps a world's facts as well as on how its output looks. The intended output is a report that states a domain of use with error bounds instead of a single score.

Inputs
One arc of a fictional world written by the founder, about a tenth of its canon, and a written rule set stating what the canon entails. For grading, query access to at least two world models that differ sharply in quality, with a visual-fidelity score and an average benchmark score on the same rollouts as comparators.
Outputs
A typed ledger of entities, relations, abilities, obligations and timed, caused events. A generated question suite in five classes (revisit, occlusion, irreversibility, handoff, counterfactual). Per-class verdicts for each model, and a report stating the domain of use with error bounds.
Limits
It grades consistency with one written world, not understanding of the world. Counterfactual questions can be settled only where the canon and the rule set entail an answer, and the rule set is itself an unaccredited simulator. Questions built from the founder's world may reward the founder's habits; only a second world, written by someone else, can test transfer. Two models far apart in quality separate extremes, not near neighbours.
Components
  • Ledger schema and extraction pass from canon to typed events
  • Contradiction checker run against the canon before the ledger is used
  • Written entailment rule set for consequences the canon leaves unstated
  • Question generator for the five classes, working from the ledger alone
  • Adapter that stages a ledger event as an action sequence and reads the rollout back as an answer, frozen in the pre-registration
  • Adjudicator that scores model answers against the ledger
  • Report template stating a domain of use with error bounds
StateSpecified

Disturbance sweep for learned policies

A harness that pushes a frozen robot policy along independent scene directions mid-episode in simulation and measures which directions it opposes, separating what the policy holds still from the scene's own physical response. The aim is a signature that predicts which held-out conditions the policy survives.

Inputs
One frozen policy checkpoint and one task from a public simulated manipulation suite for stage one; five checkpoints across two simulators for stage two; and a specificity floor and twelve held-out disturbance conditions, both to be fixed in a dated pre-registration before any data is read.
Outputs
Per-direction resistance with specificity scores, the set of directions the policy opposes and its dimension, and an out-of-sample prediction of survival across the held-out conditions, scored by AUC against a linear probe and against frozen-action deviation.
Limits
Simulation only: it says nothing about a physical robot or contact-rich manipulation. If the simulator cannot push one direction without contact, slip or a regrasp changing the physics, there is nothing to measure. Survival under twelve chosen conditions says little about conditions nobody listed. Opposition measured in the sweep does not show that a policy holds a goal, a belief or anything like perception in an organism.
Components
  • Orthonormal basis of scene directions in place of named, physically coupled variables
  • Graded mid-episode disturbance injection
  • Matched-effort control arm that spends the same effort off the disturbed direction
  • Specificity statistic: opposition in the disturbed direction against opposition elsewhere
  • Linear-probe comparator decoding the same variables from the same internal state
  • Twelve-condition held-out shift set with measured survival
StateSpecified

Workspace measurement battery

A planned set of three tests of an internal workspace in open-weight language models, to be frozen with its reliability rule and interval rules fixed in advance, so that later work can measure a model's workspace with instruments whose repeatability is known.

Inputs
Published open-weight model checkpoints of up to eight billion parameters, repeated refits of the Jacobian lens, evaluation seeds, and a held-out set of behavioural interventions such as refusal or suppressed tool calls. For the conditional second stage, a continued-training run on a model of one billion parameters or fewer.
Outputs
Report-use agreement, ignition steepness and monitorability readings per model, test-retest reliability across refits and seeds, a comparison of how the three tests rank the same models, and per-seed metrics for every run, arm and metric, kept for the analysis.
Limits
Repeatability is not validity: a reliable test can still fail to measure what it is named for. Readings on open-weight models of up to eight billion parameters do not carry to larger or closed systems by default. Intervention-based readings can mislead even when they look causal. It bears on nothing about a human workspace or experience of any kind, and a positive training result would not show that a model is easier to oversee in practice.
Components
  • Re-implemented Jacobian lens with refit procedure
  • Report-use agreement test
  • Ignition steepness index across layers
  • Monitorability probe suite scored on held-out interventions
  • Public, time-stamped pre-registration of definitions, the 0.8 reliability rule and interval rules, to be written before any data are read
  • Rotation control and concentration objective for the conditional training stage
StateSpecified

Interview rollout bench

A test bed for holding a simulated interviewee's fixed traits, permitted learning and revealed answers in separate channels, and for checking whether a question-picking planner recovers hidden attributes without winning by changing the person.

Inputs
A question-selection planner, 100 synthetic profiles with hidden attributes, a question menu from six topic families, and written rules for what a question may reveal, teach or only suggest.
Outputs
For each arm, the percentage of hidden attributes recovered within a fixed question budget, scored by a process the planner cannot see; a pass or fail against a margin written in advance; and negative-control violations reported as a diagnostic.
Limits
It is designed for synthetic profiles with hand-authored attributes and will involve no human data. A ranking of planners on this bench is not a ranking on people, and it says nothing about how real people change when asked. Attribute recovery within a budget is one aim of an interview; the bench does not measure whether a planner surfaces themes nobody planned for. One comparator is a rebuild from a paper, not its authors' system.
Components
  • State-separated interviewee interface with three channels: fixed traits, permitted learning, revealed answers
  • Set of synthetic profiles with executable reveal, teach and suggest rules
  • Out-of-process profile generator and scorer that never expose hidden attributes
  • Leakage check that rejects profiles whose hidden attributes can be read off the visible text
  • Four reference arms to be run at matched model-call cost
  • Question families frozen before scoring
StateSpecified

Exposure-graded survey benchmark

A measure of how much of each published survey instrument a language model can reproduce, and a test of whether a model's simulated answers sit closer to the published results as that measured exposure rises, beyond what each item's average answer already explains.

Inputs
Forty published survey instruments matched by construct, half published before and half after the training cut-off of the models tested, with full item text and item-level results; independent replications of the same instruments; three pinned model versions with documented cut-offs and one open-weight model for corroboration.
Outputs
A per-instrument, per-model exposure estimate with the probe's error reported, the distance between simulated and published answer distributions in floor units, the same distance for an item-mean baseline, and the exposure gradient across instruments.
Limits
The probe measures recall, not training membership; failing to recall an item does not show it was absent from training. Exposure is measured, not assigned, so topic, age and popularity can travel with it. It uses published instruments only and says nothing about whether a model estimates a fresh population's opinion. Results will be dated to the pinned model versions.
Components
  • Construct-matched instrument set split by training cut-off
  • Fixed response contract: scale points, wording and prompt frame held identical across instruments
  • Verbatim-recall and membership probe, validated on documents known to be in and out of training data
  • Blind baseline that never queries the model, which the probe must beat on its validation set by a pre-registered margin
  • Replication floor built from independent replications of each instrument
  • Item-mean baseline from each instrument's own repeated results
  • Equivalence margin to be set by a 20-item pilot and registered before the full run
StateSpecified

Counterfactual memory bench

A bench designed to copy a stored memory, name two possible later disruptions, and ask a model for the probability that the memory will still support its rule after each, before either disruption runs. Exact outcomes from a rule engine score the forecast, so a memory's ability to anticipate its own failure can be measured.

Inputs
Rule-and-exception families in a synthetic domain, each with an executable rule engine; one memory state per family; two interference classes per family drawn by a fixed generator; one small open-weight language model.
Outputs
A stated probability per family and interference class, scored by Brier score against the rule engine's outcome, with paired intervals clustered by family; the comparison of a trained risk predictor with an equal-information model. If the predictor passes on Brier score, a stage-two comparison of later rule-application error under a fixed byte budget.
Limits
It is designed for one synthetic rule domain and one small model, and would not show that a forecast transfers to real agent memories, other content or other models. The families and the test share an author, so the size of a gain can be shaped by how interference classes are chosen; the fixed generator reduces that risk without removing it. It makes no claim about human memory and tests no person.
Components
  • Corpus of 96 rule-and-exception families, each written separately, with exact labels, 64 of them to be verified and sealed at the corpus gate
  • Fixed generator that draws the two interference classes, so a family's author does not choose its comparison
  • Clone-and-replay procedure that snapshots memory state before the interference runs
  • Equal-information comparator: the same model given the same memory and the same interference descriptions, with no parameters trained on outcomes except a single temperature fitted on the 64 sealed families
  • Brier scoring with paired, family-clustered intervals and a leak check on the class descriptions
  • Budgeted write controller, built only if the predictor passes on Brier score; its cut in later rule-application error is the stage-two pass condition
StateSpecified

Supersession benchmark

A benchmark to be built from a licensed public record of superseded items, designed to grade knowledge editing by how many facts depend on a changed fact, reporting both whether dependents update and whether unrelated facts change wrongly.

Inputs
A public record of superseded items with a machine-readable dependency map and a licence that permits publishing derived material, with at least 150 events of three or more dependents confirmed by hand count; weight-based editing methods at stated update budgets; open-weight base models over several seeds.
Outputs
At each rung of the dependency ladder, the share of dependents updated correctly and the share of control facts changed wrongly; for each method and budget, the number of dependents above which propagation falls below the floor; a re-runnable results table.
Limits
It would describe named methods at named budgets on one record, not a limit on knowledge editing in general. It does not cover methods that keep changed facts outside the weights, such as an external store or an edit placed in the prompt. Another record may give a different curve, the labelling check covers a sample only, and the record may already sit in the base models' training data. If no record reaches 150 events, the benchmark will not be built.
Components
  • Item generator that groups events on a ladder of 1, 2, 4 and 8 or more dependents
  • Audit protocol in which two raters, one from outside the lab, check a sample of the dependents the dependency map proposes on whether the answer must change, with an agreement report and the audit's error rate reported with every propagation figure
  • Graph-blind labelling sample to check what the dependency map misses
  • Two control sets: facts that look like a dependent and facts near the edit in the graph
  • Evaluation code reporting propagation against wrong changes per method, budget and seed
  • Licence note for the underlying material and its derived slices
StateSpecified

Revisable memory runtime

A candidate design for a layered memory system for agents. It is designed to keep raw traces of each event, write typed records with origin, time and scope, mark each record's state as conditions change, and assemble a short brief for the task in hand instead of a dump of retrieved text. Each layer above a plain retrieval baseline stays only if an ablation shows it earns its cost.

Inputs
A stream of events such as conversation turns, documents and observations; the context of the current task; corrections from a user or an evaluator.
Outputs
A compact operating brief for the task; memory records marked active, outdated, superseded, contradicted, narrowed or scoped, each traceable to where it came from; an explanation of why a record was retrieved; and ablation results comparing each layer with a raw-retrieval baseline and a typed-memory baseline.
Limits
It is a candidate architecture for testing a thesis, not a final design, and any layer that fails its ablation will be removed or demoted. It does not attempt universal world modelling, autonomous consolidation, graph-native reasoning or self-modelling. Graph storage and ontology labels stay optional until they show a gain on a chosen benchmark. A better brief on benchmark tasks would not show better behaviour in deployment.
Components
  • Append-only raw event store that keeps original traces unchanged
  • Typed memory record store with origin, timestamp, scope and trust basis
  • Revision layer for temporal validity, supersession and contradiction
  • Retrieval orchestrator and brief builder that filter by validity before assembly
  • Inspection and correction interface for review, edit, scoping and deletion
  • Optional relation layer, added only if relation-aware retrieval beats typed records alone
StateSpecified

Domain judgement model

A candidate design for a small model, to be trained on domain material labelled with a stated scheme of categories and relations and on judgement scenarios, that decides which rules, patterns and rubrics of a domain apply to a given situation; to be tested against a frontier model given the same material through structured retrieval, deterministic validators and a repair loop, and kept only if it adds value over that baseline.

Inputs
Domain material labelled with a stated scheme of categories and relations, with each item's origin recorded; judgement scenarios with critique and repair explanations; and a situation to judge. The first domain is software-architecture judgement.
Outputs
A judgement of which domain rules, patterns and rubrics apply, with reasons; a comparison against the frontier baseline on the same situations; and, if the model passes, a tool interface through which a larger model can call it.
Limits
It is a candidate design. Following a schema is not domain judgement, and the evaluation is designed to tell the two apart. The default expectation is sceptical: validators plus retrieval and repair may beat a trained small model, and if they do the model will not be pursued. A result in one domain would not carry to another. It makes no claim that a labelling scheme present in training text produces understanding.
Components
  • Training set built from the labelled domain material and scenario traces
  • Small open-weight model adapted on that set
  • Retrieval over the same labelled material
  • Deterministic validators that check outputs against the labelling scheme
  • Model-assisted repair loop
  • Baseline arm: a frontier model with retrieval, validators and repair