Identity as Attractor: Geometric Evidence for Persistent Agent Architecture in LLM Activation Space
Large language models map semantically related prompts to similar internal representations -- a phenomenon interpretable as attractor-like dynamics. We ask whether the identity document of a persistent cognitive agent (its cognitive_core) exhibits analogous attractor-like behavior. We present a controlled experiment on Llama 3.1 8B Instruct, comparing hidden states of an original cognitive_core (Condition A), seven paraphrases (Condition B), and seven structurally matched controls (Condition C). Mean-pooled states at layers 8, 16, and 24 show that paraphrases converge to a tighter cluster than controls (Cohen's d > 1.88, p < 10^{-27}, Bonferroni-corrected). Replication on Gemma 2 9B confi...
| Authors | Vladimir Vasilenko |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 13 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 April 2026 |
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