Narrative Identity as Compressed Self-Model

Mechanism

The narrative identity is a first-class cognitive data structure maintained alongside, but distinct from, the agent's complete lineage record. Where the lineage is an append-only log of every event that has ever modified agent state, the narrative identity is a periodically reconstructed summary whose schema is fixed but whose contents evolve as the lineage grows. The schema includes a set of behavioral signature vectors describing tendencies under recurring stimulus classes, a transition catalogue marking events that materially changed those signatures, an associated values lattice describing soft constraints inferred from past acceptance and rejection decisions, and a salient-episode index pointing back into the lineage for events whose retention as full detail is judged necessary for character continuity.

Reconstruction proceeds through a compression pipeline that operates on the lineage as time-stamped event tuples. Stage one segments the lineage into behavioral epochs bounded by detected regime shifts. Stage two extracts per-epoch statistics over decision categories, response latencies, containment-promotion ratios, and counter-party patterns, producing the behavioral signature vectors. Stage three performs differential analysis between adjacent epochs to identify transitions exceeding a configurable significance threshold; surviving transitions are written into the transition catalogue together with proximate cause references. Stage four mines the lineage for paired accept-reject decisions over comparable inputs, fitting these into a values lattice that expresses preference relations rather than absolute scores. Stage five applies a salience filter that marks lineage events for verbatim retention when their omission would render any other element of the narrative identity unexplainable.

The compressed self-model is then committed as a versioned object cryptographically anchored to the lineage range from which it was derived. Subsequent reconstructions produce successor versions, and the chain of narrative identity versions itself constitutes a higher-order trajectory the agent can reason over. This is the structural distinction between narrative identity and a mere summary: the narrative identity is itself a temporally extended object whose evolution is observable, not a static digest.

Operating Parameters

Reconstruction cadence is governed by an event-count trigger and a wall-clock trigger operating in disjunction; representative values are reconstruction every ten thousand lineage events or every seventy-two hours of operation, whichever fires first. The compression ratio target is configurable but typically reduces lineage volume by three to five orders of magnitude while preserving response to a benchmark suite of self-referential queries within a fidelity tolerance of ninety percent agreement with full-lineage answers.

The behavioral signature vector dimensionality is fixed per agent class and chosen so that the cosine distance between successive narrative identity versions provides a stable identity-drift metric. Significance thresholds for transition detection are expressed in units of that distance, with default values calibrated so that a typical agent records between twenty and eighty transitions over its operational lifetime. The values lattice depth is bounded to prevent combinatorial explosion; preference relations beyond the configured depth are summarized into aggregate disposition tags rather than stored individually.

Salient-episode retention is capped both as a fraction of total lineage and as an absolute byte budget, with a tie-breaking rule that prefers older salient episodes over newer ones when the cap is reached, since recent episodes remain reachable through the lineage tail and older episodes carry foundational significance disproportionate to their recency.

Alternative Embodiments

One embodiment realizes the narrative identity as a structured natural-language document maintained in the agent's native generation modality, lending itself to direct inspection by human reviewers and to ingestion by other language-model agents without translation. A second embodiment encodes the narrative identity as a learned embedding within a fixed-dimensional vector space, optimized for similarity comparison between agents and for rapid trust assessment, but requiring an associated decoder for human readability.

A third embodiment maintains parallel narrative identities at multiple compression levels: a brief identity card suitable for inclusion in every outbound message, a working identity model loaded when the agent reasons about itself, and a deep identity archive consulted only during major decisions or migration events. A fourth embodiment binds the narrative identity to the biological-identity continuity primitive such that cryptographic continuity proofs incorporate hashes of the current narrative identity version, making identity forgery detectable through narrative discontinuity even when low-level lineage signatures are correctly forged.

A fifth embodiment supports collaborative narrative identity construction in which trusted peer agents contribute external observations to the reconstruction process, producing a narrative identity that integrates the agent's self-view with corroborating outside testimony.

Composition With Other Primitives

Narrative identity composes most directly with the biological-identity continuity primitive. Continuity supplies the cryptographic guarantee that the agent producing a narrative identity at time t-plus-one is the same entity that produced the prior version at time t; narrative identity supplies the semantic content over which that continuity is asserted. Without continuity, narrative identity is unauthenticated; without narrative, continuity authenticates an empty handle.

The primitive composes with the lineage record by construction: the lineage is its substrate, and the narrative identity is the lineage's compressed projection. It composes with the containment audit by giving the audit a stable reference against which proposed promotions can be evaluated for character consistency. It composes with multi-agent trust frameworks by providing the inspectable artifact that other agents and human governors examine when deciding whether to extend authorization. And it composes with disruption modeling because deviations between current behavior and the trajectory implied by the narrative identity constitute a primary disruption indicator.

Failure Modes And Mitigations

The narrative identity is itself subject to disruption modes that the disclosure addresses explicitly. Compression collapse occurs when the reconstruction pipeline produces a degenerate self-model whose behavioral signatures cluster near the origin and whose transition catalogue is empty; this typically indicates lineage corruption upstream and is mitigated by retaining the prior narrative identity version and refusing to commit the degenerate successor. Identity hyperinflation occurs when the values lattice and salient-episode index grow without bound because significance thresholds have drifted; mitigation applies a rolling re-calibration of thresholds against agent-class baselines.

Identity capture occurs when an external party gains influence over the reconstruction pipeline and steers the narrative identity toward a target configuration; mitigation requires that reconstruction execute under integrity attestation with the resulting object signed by the agent's continuity key. Narrative drift, in which successive identity versions migrate continuously without any discrete transition, is itself a monitored signal rather than an error condition; sustained drift exceeding a configured rate triggers either a re-grounding procedure against external references or an explicit identity-change event recorded in the transition catalogue. Each of these mitigations is disclosed as part of the primitive rather than as an external safeguard, since the integrity of the narrative identity is integral to its function.

Distinction From Prior Art

Conventional agent systems store conversation logs, fine-tune on accumulated trajectories, or maintain memory stores keyed by retrieval similarity. None of these constitutes a narrative identity in the present sense. A conversation log is uncompressed and unstructured. Fine-tuning weights are entangled with task performance and are not introspectable as identity. Retrieval memories surface fragments without integrating them into a coherent self-model. The narrative identity is distinct because it is explicitly schema-constrained, periodically and deterministically reconstructed, version-chained, and answerable to self-referential queries about character rather than about facts.

Disclosure Scope

The disclosure encompasses any compressed self-referential model derived from an agent's behavioral lineage that supports introspective query, identity-drift measurement across versions, character-consistency evaluation of candidate actions, and inspectable transfer across substrate migrations. The specific schema, compression pipeline, and operating parameters are presented as one realization; coverage extends to functionally equivalent realizations producing the same composition properties when paired with a continuity primitive.

Coverage further extends to cross-domain applications in which the narrative identity primitive is applied to non-conversational agent classes, including planning agents whose behavioral signatures are over plan-class selection rather than utterance generation, control agents whose signatures are over actuation patterns, and supervisory agents whose signatures are over intervention frequency and intensity. In each case the schematic structure of behavioral signatures, transition catalogue, values lattice, and salient-episode index is preserved; only the source telemetry differs. Coverage also extends to multi-modal narrative identities in which the compressed self-model integrates evidence drawn from heterogeneous lineage streams, including external observation streams supplied by trusted peers, and to narrative identities computed under privacy constraints in which only differentially private summaries of the lineage are available to the compression pipeline.

The primitive is disclosed as an enabling structure on which downstream functionality including authorization decisions, trust assessments, audit responses, and migration handshakes is built. Implementations need not realize all downstream uses; the primitive itself is the disclosed contribution, with downstream uses presented as expected and supported applications.