Named Control Field Modulation Architecture

Mechanism

The named control field architecture replaces the conventional monolithic affect score with a structured record. Each affective dimension is materialized as a first-class control field bearing a stable name drawn from a published schema, a current magnitude in a normalized value space, a decay rate that governs return-to-baseline behavior in the absence of stimulus, a policy-defined ceiling and floor that bound the magnitude across all writers, an observation timestamp recording when the magnitude was last updated, and a semantic version identifier indicating the schema under which the field's name is to be interpreted. The canonical field set comprises arousal, valence, motivation, fatigue, and social-trust; deployment-specific extensions may introduce additional named fields provided they conform to the same tuple shape and are registered against a versioned schema.

Each field carries an independent update pipeline. When an upstream estimator emits an affective observation, the observation is decomposed into per-field components, and each component is routed to the corresponding field's update function. The update function clamps the proposed magnitude against the field's policy-defined ceiling and floor, applies the field-specific decay function to reconcile the prior magnitude against the elapsed time since the previous update, and records the resulting magnitude together with the new timestamp. Writes are credentialed: the writing component must hold authority recognized by the field's access policy, and unauthorized writes are rejected and logged rather than silently accepted.

Reads return the field tuple in its entirety, including the semantic version, so that consumers can detect schema drift and refuse to operate on fields whose semantics they do not understand. The architecture deliberately separates the storage of the field magnitude from the interpretation of its name: the name is a stable, externally-published handle, while the interpretation belongs to the schema referenced by the version identifier. This separation permits the meaning of a field to be refined across schema versions without breaking compatibility for consumers pinned to the prior interpretation.

Operating Parameters

Each named control field is parameterized by at least seven values. The field name is a stable string drawn from the registered schema. The current magnitude is a scalar in the field's normalized value space, conventionally the closed interval from zero to one for monotonic fields and the closed interval from negative one to positive one for bipolar fields such as valence. The decay rate is a non-negative scalar specifying the per-second exponential decay constant by which the magnitude returns toward the field's resting value in the absence of stimulus. The policy-defined ceiling and floor bound the magnitude and are enforced on every write, regardless of the writer's authority. The observation timestamp is a wall-clock value with sufficient resolution to disambiguate consecutive writes. The semantic version is an identifier resolving to a published schema entry that defines the field's intended interpretation.

Field semantics are versioned independently of the agent's policy reference. A field's schema entry specifies the field's name, its value space, its expected decay characteristics, the kinds of stimuli that legitimately produce magnitude changes, and the consumers entitled to read it. Schema versions are immutable once published; revisions are effected by publishing a new version with a new identifier, leaving the prior version available for consumers that have not yet migrated. The agent's policy reference selects which schema version is in force; rollover between schema versions is performed at policy-rollover boundaries, and the version identifier is recorded in lineage alongside every magnitude observation.

Access policy on a per-field basis distinguishes three modes: readable, writable, and constrainable. Readable fields may be observed by any consumer authorized at the agent level. Writable fields may have their magnitudes updated by writers holding the corresponding credential. Constrainable fields may have their ceilings and floors adjusted by governance authorities, typically at policy-rollover boundaries rather than during live operation. The three modes are independent: a field may be widely readable, narrowly writable, and constrainable only by a governance role.

Decay rates are tuned per-field to match the timescale of the underlying psychological dimension. Fast-decaying fields such as arousal return to baseline within seconds in the absence of stimulus, ensuring that transient activation does not produce persistent behavioral bias. Slow-decaying fields such as social-trust retain accumulated adjustments across sessions, ensuring that earned or lost trust persists into subsequent interactions. The decay function is conventionally exponential, but the architecture admits alternative decay forms — linear, piecewise, or schedule-driven — provided they are deterministic and reproducible from the recorded timestamps.

Alternative Embodiments

In a first alternative embodiment, the named control fields are stored in a content-addressed registry rather than an in-memory tuple structure. Each write produces a new content hash, and the field's current value is identified by the most recent hash in a per-field append-only log. This embodiment provides cryptographic audit at the cost of additional storage overhead and is suited to high-assurance deployments.

In a second alternative embodiment, the field schema is extended with derivation rules, allowing certain fields to be computed deterministically from others. For example, a derived motivation field might be computed from a weighted combination of arousal, valence, and an external goal-distance signal, rather than written directly. Derived fields share the same tuple shape and access policy as primary fields and are indistinguishable to consumers; their derivation status is recorded in the schema entry and in lineage.

In a third alternative embodiment, the per-field decay function is replaced by a coupled decay tensor that reflects cross-field dynamics. Fatigue may decay more slowly when motivation is low; social-trust may decay more rapidly during periods of elevated arousal. The coupled embodiment captures interactions that the independent-field embodiment cannot express, at the cost of substantially increased calibration complexity.

In a fourth alternative embodiment, the field tuple is extended to include a confidence scalar denoting the estimator's certainty about the magnitude. Consumers may then weight or filter field reads by confidence, treating low-confidence values as advisory rather than authoritative. The confidence scalar is updated by the upstream estimator and is itself bounded by a per-field policy ceiling.

In a fifth alternative embodiment, the schema versioning is extended with a deprecation marker that signals consumers to migrate away from a field whose semantics will change in a future schema version. Deprecation markers do not alter the field's behavior under the current schema but enable orderly migration of the consumer ecosystem.

Composition with Other Primitives

Named control fields compose with the promotion-threshold primitive: each field carries its own threshold record specifying the magnitude required for the field to influence higher-order policy, and the gated output of the threshold stage is what downstream consumers observe. The pairing ensures that the named-field architecture exposes both raw magnitudes for diagnostic visualization and gated magnitudes for policy consumption, without conflating the two.

Named control fields compose with the lineage-recording substrate by emitting per-field write events as first-class lineage entries. Each entry includes the field name, the schema version, the prior and posterior magnitudes, the writer's credential, and the wall-clock timestamp. Forensic reconstruction of an agent's affective trajectory becomes a per-field log analysis rather than a fused-signal regression.

Named control fields compose with the confidence-governance primitive in that confidence-relevant fields — uncertainty sensitivity, social-trust, fatigue — can be consumed individually by the confidence governor, allowing distinct dimensions to influence execution authorization through distinct weightings rather than through a single fused affect score.

Prior-Art Distinction

Affective computing has a long tradition of representing emotion as a multidimensional vector, most prominently the valence-arousal-dominance model and its descendants. The novelty here is not the multidimensionality of affect but the operational architecture: each dimension is a named, schema-versioned, individually-credentialed, individually-auditable control field, with its own decay rate, ceiling, and floor, written and read through a credentialed access policy and recorded in lineage on every transition.

Prior cognitive-agent architectures that incorporate affect typically expose either a single fused score or an unversioned vector. Such architectures cannot distinguish between a behavior change caused by elevated arousal and one caused by depressed motivation, and cannot revise the meaning of any one dimension without breaking compatibility for all consumers. The named-field architecture provides this distinction structurally through the field-name handle and provides forward compatibility through the per-field schema version.

Prior policy-versioned configuration systems exist in the operations literature, but they version the configuration as a whole rather than the semantic interpretation of individual signals. The architecture disclosed here applies semantic versioning at the field level, an approach borrowed from API contract evolution and extended to runtime affective state.

Disclosure Scope

This disclosure covers the representation of affective state as a set of named control fields, each carrying a stable name, a current magnitude, a decay rate, policy-defined ceiling and floor values, an observation timestamp, and a semantic version identifier, individually readable, writable, and auditable under credentialed access policy. It encompasses the canonical field set of arousal, valence, motivation, fatigue, and social-trust, as well as the extensibility mechanism through which deployment-specific fields are registered against a versioned schema.

The disclosure encompasses the per-field update pipeline, the policy-defined bounds enforcement, the decay-function reconciliation, the credentialed write semantics, the lineage-recording of field transitions, and the alternative embodiments enumerated above including content-addressed storage, derived fields, coupled decay tensors, confidence-augmented tuples, and deprecation-marked schema versioning.

The disclosure is intended to read on any embodiment in which an agent's affective state is exposed as a structured set of named, versioned, individually-governable scalar fields rather than as a fused score or an unversioned vector, regardless of the specific field set, the encoding of the field tuple, the decay function, or the choice of downstream consumers. The disclosure is independent of the specific upstream estimator that produces the magnitudes and applies equally to estimators based on physiological signals, behavioral inference, conversational analysis, or any combination thereof.