Organizations: Independent Researchers in Behavioural Modelling, Causal Inference, and Genomics · Assessli · Dots-In
Abstract
A central puzzle for the behavioural sciences and for human-facing artificial intelligence is the persistence of within-person variability. The same individual, presented with the same observable input, produces different outcomes on different occasions, and different individuals produce divergent outcomes that no observable covariate fully predicts. We argue that this variability belongs in the dynamic latent state of the person, and that human outcomes are controllable in a precise and operational sense through interventions that target the state and its weighting at the moment a decision is being formed. We define a state as the time-indexed weighting vector over the dimensions that govern how an individual's biology, physiology, and neuropsychology process the next event into a decision and an outcome. The relationship between state, decision, and outcome is causal rather than correlational. The weighting vector is dynamic at sub-daily timescales. The conscious channel through which outcomes are reportable is a narrow attentional bottleneck whose contents are themselves state-dependent. Taken together, these claims imply that the outcome of a given event is controllable, conditionally, on the state-trajectory at the time of intervention. We motivate the framework with six strands of established evidence (causal inference, predictive processing, allostasis, attentional bottleneck, chronobiology, computational psychiatry) and a 24-month observational base from a deployed behavioural platform spanning more than 200,000 consented users across four occupational personas (research period 2023 to 2026). We derive seven testable predictions, list six operational requirements for state-aware systems, and discuss implications for digital health, education, AI personalisation, and personal agency.
Driving a system from one state to another through targeted interventions is a fundamental challenge in science, yet most predictive models offer limited mechanistic insight and no principled framework for decision-making. Here we present COAST (Causally Optimal Actions for State Transitions), a causal-intelligence approach for the in-silico design of constrained interventions that induce user-defined state transitions. Given data characterizing source and target states, COAST learns context-specific causal graphs and structural causal models, attributes observed distributional shifts to mechanism-level causal drivers, and introduces a novel constraint-aware multi-objective optimization formulation that balances transition efficacy, intervention complexity, and target-state stability. The approach is modular and domain-agnostic, integrating feature selection, causal discovery, causal modeling, and intervention identification and evaluation through interchangeable components. Across synthetic benchmarks and real biological datasets, COAST recovers key causal drivers and identifies robust single- and multi-target intervention strategies that achieve desired state transitions, accompanied by transparent mechanistic rationales to guide experimental validation.
Autonomous language agents increasingly expose traces, memories, plans and constraints, but existing evaluations rarely test whether these state variables are bound to final actions. We introduce causal state binding, an intervention-coupled evaluation framework that measures whether actions change with the event-specific decisive state while remaining invariant to irrelevant cues. The primary readout is a hidden-target finite-action benchmark in which scorer-side intervention targets are assigned before generation and withheld from the model-visible prompt. Across 57,816 scored records in seven corpus-level units, structured-agent conditions exceeded high-randomness controls and targeted component removals on reason, memory, veto and self-continuity responsiveness. Open-weight validation across Qwen2.5 7B, 14B and 32B plus Mistral-7B showed that action priors, no-field prompts and scrambled decisive context did not recover the structured-control signature. In diagnostic finite-action probes, the minimal decisive-field readout recovered the prescribed action pattern whereas surface-only, action-prior-only and scrambled-field controls did not. Across 300 SWE-bench Lite issue records and six API models, adding an oracle-free causal state-binding composite to a full non-CSB baseline increased constraint-clean issue-to-file hit@3 AUC from 0.873 to 0.935. This validation concerns issue-to-file localization, not patch application or SWE-bench issue resolution. These results support a measurement principle for agent evaluation: action control is predicted by event-specific state-action binding, not by output entropy, action-prior matching or rationale format alone.
Affective computing has advanced wearable state inference, but on-device reasoning about whether, when, and how to intervene remains challenging. We present Affective Agent, a three-layer reference architecture for personalized intervention reasoning under uncertainty on wearable-class hardware. It combines a compact sub-billion-parameter language model with physiological evidence, context, and user history to decide whether, when, and how to intervene, without cloud dependency or per-user retraining. The architecture is organized into three interacting layers (perception, personalization, and reasoning), adapting to individual users through host-managed structured memory evolution rather than per-user weight updates. We instantiate Affective Agent in indoor environmental quality control and evaluate it on held-out, simulator-generated longitudinal scenarios spanning physiological variation, context, signal quality, and intervention history. Results show that memory-driven personalization and two-pass structured reasoning improve intervention decisions within this synthetic evaluation. By moving the decision layer on-device, this work demonstrates a path from wearable state inference toward closed-loop, personalized intervention on wearable-class hardware.