core/docs/adr/ADR-0208-environmental-sensorium-loop.md
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- Consolidation: Merged brief/, handoff/, planning/, and decisions/ into briefs/, handoffs/, plans/, and adr/ respectively (101 ADRs relocated)
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- Note: Also includes prior commit adding ADR-0200+ corpus hygiene governance (ADR-0225, dependency map, backfilled cross-references)
2026-06-30 16:59:36 -07:00

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ADR-0208: Environmental Sensorium Loop

Status: Accepted (ratified 2026-06-03) — implementation landed (afferent scope) Date: 2026-06-04 Implementation: sensorium/environment/frame.py (PR #540) + sensorium/environment/harness.py (PR #541). Proof obligations are covered by falsifiable tests in tests/test_observation_frame_contract.py (order-invariant frame trace hash, merge_key dedup, TypeError on raw-payload units, ValueError on efferent units) and tests/test_observation_frame_harness.py. Disjoint from the GSM8K serving path (no import of generate.derivation / core.reliability_gate). Domains: sensorium/environment/, sensorium/compiler/, sensorium/*, future sensorimotor compilers Depends on: ADR-0013, ADR-0180, ADR-0181, ADR-0197, ADR-0198

Decision

CORE will represent a moment of environmental evidence as an ObservationFrame: a deterministic bundle of already-compiled afferent CompilationUnitLike deltas. The frame is not a fusion layer, not a shared embedding space, and not a mutable world model.

environment
  -> modality compilers
  -> compiled afferent units
  -> ObservationFrame
  -> Delta-CRDT merge
  -> field / recall / cognition
  -> governed efferent decode
  -> action result / proprioception re-enters as afferent evidence

Contract

ObservationFrame contains:

frame_id
monotonic_tick
source_clock
units: tuple[CompilationUnitLike, ...]
causal_parent_ids
environment_sha256
trace_hash

Rules:

  • Units are canonicalized by merge_key and exact duplicates deduplicate.
  • Trace records contain hashes and provenance only, never raw pixels, PCM, or actuator payloads.
  • Audio chunks, vision tiles, text turns, and future proprioceptive feedback remain native compilation units.
  • Motor commands and action traces are efferent; they are not observation units.
  • Action outcomes re-enter through afferent sensorimotor/proprioceptive compilers.

Consequences

This closes the architectural gap between independent modality compilers and an embodied environment loop without inventing late fusion. Cross-modal coherence is recovered after merge through exact manifold recall and field resonance. The hot path stays local and deterministic; fleet/offline aggregation remains a proposal/review path, not runtime truth.

Proof Obligations

  • Same afferent units in any arrival order produce the same frame trace hash.
  • Unsafe raw payloads fail before entering frame traces.
  • Efferent action records fail if passed as observation units.
  • Sensorimotor feedback can enter as afferent evidence without enabling motor emission.

Governance Cross-Reference (ADR-0225)

This late-corpus ADR is governed by ADR-0225:

  • Safety boundaries: changes must preserve ADR-0027/0028/0029 identity and safety-pack boundaries; no identity, safety, or policy mutation is implied unless explicitly reviewed.
  • Versor closure: runtime field paths must preserve versor_condition(F) < 1e-6; this ADR does not authorize hidden normalization or hot-path drift repair.
  • Reconstruction-over-storage: evidence must remain reconstructive and content-addressed rather than duplicating opaque state.
  • Replay-equivalence: serving, teaching, promotion, or checkpoint changes require a named deterministic replay / byte-equivalence gate.
  • Mutation standing: any durable corpus, pack, policy, or epistemic-status mutation remains reviewed, proposal-only until accepted, or proof-carrying as applicable.