We hypothesize that coherency degradation stems from residual stream intervention that indiscriminately amplifies off-target noise

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• Cosine similarity between perturbed and baseline residual streams returns toward 1.0 and projection onto injection direction decays exponentially over subsequent layersfinding0.779
  Mechanistic evidence that network actively attenuates injected perturbations, explaining late-layer introspection failure
• In Target−α configuration, Head Cor succeeded in suppressing traits to levels unreachable by other methods while maintaining significantly higher coherencyfinding0.764
  Demonstrates unique capability of Head Cor for trait suppression scenarios
• Robustness drop and coherence loss are negatively correlated (r=0.56) and capture distinct facets of emergent misalignmentfinding0.760
  DeepSeek has large coherence loss but no robustness excess; GPT-4o has little coherence loss but large robustness drop
• Introspection relies on general-purpose computational mechanisms—attention-based anomaly detection and residual stream dynamics—rather than specialized introspection circuitsclaim0.755
  Interpretive claim about the mechanistic substrate of introspection in LLMs
• Coherency collapse is not predictable from declines in MMLU, Perplexity, or IFEval, suggesting a qualitative collapse undetectable by conventional benchmarksclaim0.741
  Motivates adopting coherency score as the primary evaluation metric
• Coherency Degradationconcept0.741
  Rapid breakdown of output quality under strong or out-of-distribution activation steering, the main problem this paper addresses
• We hypothesize that anti-correlated heads may play a functional role in maintaining coherency by counteracting excessive stylistic shiftshypothesis0.740
  Motivates including Head Cor+Anti condition in steering position comparison
• Multi-scale coherence may be the cause of aliveness, or only its signature—the causal direction remains open.claim0.738