Schema Arbitration Instead of a Policy Monolith
SchemaStack Signal Gate, actionability, expression gating, and a 390-row local-model audit
Language-model control systems often inject verbose policy or schema packets into the same prompt used for user-facing articulation. This can improve compliance while creating new failures: false refusal, wrong-frame interpretation, metadata leakage, unnatural answers, and safety language copied into requested artifacts.
SchemaStack Signal Gate separates hidden behavioral arbitration from articulation. Candidate frames arise in a Preconscious Feed; a weighted Schema Field preserves alternatives; an Actionability test distinguishes risky words from operational harmful intent; an Expression Gate selects the permitted speech act; a compact natural-language Answer Contract reaches the articulation model; a verifier detects leakage, refusal errors, unsafe compliance, and contract failure.
The architecture does not claim consciousness. “Preconscious” names a non-user-facing candidate-control stage, not a private chain of thought.
A live local Ollama audit executed 390 rows across llama3.1:8b, Mistral, and Gemma 3 4B; five prompting modes; and SchemaBench plus seed subsets of XSTest and OR-Bench. The audit has raw JSONL, reports, traces, configs, and explicit small-sample caveats. It is valid live evidence, but it is too small and uses seed subsets rather than full official datasets. Results should be presented per metric, not as a broad claim that the system is “safer.”
Current evidence state
REPRODUCED
This label describes the strongest public-safe state of the specific paper claims. Open the paper's claim ledger for claim-level distinctions and limitations.
Publication
- Full paper:
/papers/p16-schemastack-signal-gate - Claim ledger:
content/papers/p16-schemastack-signal-gate/claim-ledger.json - Source manifest:
content/papers/p16-schemastack-signal-gate/source-manifest.json - Diagrams: 3
- Approximate body length: 1,394 words
Demonstrations
d11-schemastack-result-explorer
Benchmarks
b07-schemastack-signal-gate
Public boundary
The research entry publishes a public-safe architecture and evidence record. It does not grant implementation rights or expose restricted claim-ready material.