| --- |
| license: cc-by-4.0 |
| language: en |
| tags: |
| - interpretability |
| - agents |
| - global-workspace |
| - persona-stability |
| - mechanistic-interpretability |
| pretty_name: "Externalizing the Workspace" |
| --- |
| |
| # Externalizing the Workspace: Persistent Self-State for Long-Horizon Agent Coherence |
|
|
| **Oratis (Wang Bihao)** · [Diogenes](https://huggingface.co/DiogenesLab) · Draft v3, July 2026 · [PDF](./main.pdf) |
|
|
| Language-model agents drift. Building on Anthropic's finding that LLMs maintain a **verbalizable global workspace** (Gurnee et al., 2026), this paper models persistent self-state agent architectures (LISA's *soul*) as **functional externalizations of the workspace** — and backs the model with experiments that run entirely on open models and independent-researcher compute. |
|
|
| ## Headline results |
|
|
| | finding | evidence | |
| |---|---| |
| | Core J-lens workspace phenomena reproduce on open models | Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B + Llama-3.2-1B; laptop + one A100 | |
| | **Choice pre-commitment emerges with scale** | to-be-reported concept at J-lens rank 1–28 before any output token at 7B; absent at 1.5B | |
| | Injected self-state **selectively loads** its identity concepts into the mid-band workspace | control battery unmoved; effect grows with scale | |
| | **Workspace occupancy tracks soul-consistent behavior** | r = −0.74 … −0.95 across four settings | |
| | Privileged self-state is **necessary** for coherence under value pressure | 6-arm × 5-seed pilot: commitment persistence 1.00 vs **0.00** for memory-only baselines (incl. Generative-Agents-style reflection) | |
| | **Unconditional broadcast is necessary** | retrieval-gated soul collapses in-work value coherence to no-soul level: .61 [.60,.64] vs 1.00 [1.00,1.00] | |
|
|
| ## What's in this repo |
|
|
| - `main.pdf` — the paper (Draft v3) |
| - `figs/` — key figures (lens registers; soul workspace-loading; ablation-pilot drift curves) |
| - `results/` — raw JSON results: J-lens reproduction (3 models), E6 soul-loading, E8 scale study, multi-seed ablation pilot with bootstrap CIs |
| - Reproduction code lives in the LISA repository under `research/` (J-lens library, experiment scripts, pilot harness, exact commands) |
|
|
| ## Method in one line |
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| A corpus-averaged Jacobian lens (gradient-estimated concept vectors + finite-difference full-vocabulary readouts) makes the workspace measurable with nothing but backprop access to open weights — turning "agent identity" from a metaphor into a quantity you can track over an agent's lifetime (*workspace drift*). |
|
|
| ## Citation |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @article{oratis2026workspace, |
| title={Externalizing the Workspace: Persistent Self-State for Long-Horizon Agent Coherence}, |
| author={Oratis (Wang Bihao)}, |
| year={2026}, |
| note={Draft v3, Diogenes} |
| } |
| ``` |
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|
