SerenAI: State-transition system inspired by text-based world AI models
Organizations: Collision Technologies S.R.L.S. Societa Benefit Trieste, Italy
Abstract
Although professional workflows leverage large language models widely, the interpretation for auditing unconstrained free-text generation is usually intractable if such generation demands legal, operational or financial workflow. We hereby demonstrate a text based system called SerenAI - inspired by world-models, it is a state transition system that outputs verifiable predictions rather than merely text: Provided with a description of the environment, state, and actions, the generated output contains 4 items: causal deltas that causally effect the given state, a next state that can logically follow from the given state and action, a validity reward, and a termination signal. For the released proto-model, we employ 2 steps of adaptation training, namely parameter efficient fine-tuning followed by verifier based RL over 50,000 exampled cause and effects in 12 environments spanning 10 reasoning domains. Compared to an initial internal evaluation of an 8B open-weight baseline, SerenAI increased JSON validity from 85.0% to 93.2%, schema validity from 55.0% to 84.0%, exact structured-output match from 0.0% to 41.5%, causal-delta exact match from 0.0% to 41.5%, resulting-state exact match from 0.0% to 42.0%, reward exact match from 1.0% to 80.5%, and termination exact match from 38.0% to 81.5%. These support the narrower claim that verifier-compatible adaptation can improve structured transition prediction. They do not yet establish legal-grade reliability. Accordingly, the paper also specifies a validation protocol for evidence-grounded legal workflows, calibration, human oversight, and sovereign on-premise deployment.
Figures & tables
| Item | Reported value |
|---|---|
| Total records | 50,000 |
| Training split | 45,000 |
| Validation split | 2,500 |
| Test split | 2,500 in split description; separate narrative says 5,000 evaluation samples |
| Environments | 12 |
| Reasoning domains | 10; seven examples named in this study |
| Metric | Base | SerenAI | pp |
|---|---|---|---|
| JSON validity | 85.0 | 93.2 | +8.2 |
| Schema validity | 55.0 | 84.0 | +29.0 |
| Exact JSON match | 0.0 | 41.5 | +41.5 |
| Causal delta exact | 0.0 | 41.5 | +41.5 |
| Resulting state exact | 0.0 | 42.0 | +42.0 |
| Reward exact | 1.0 | 80.5 | +79.5 |
| Condition | Question answered |
|---|---|
| Base, prompt only | How much structure and transition ability exists before adaptation? |
| Base + constrained decoding | How much validity gain is purely syntactic? |
| QLoRA SFT | What is learned from curated demonstrations alone? |
| QLoRA SFT + verifier selection | Does inference-time verification improve exact state prediction? |
| QLoRA SFT + RLVR/GRPO | What is the incremental policy-learning gain over SFT? |
| SFT + RL + constrained decoding | What is the strongest defense-in-depth configuration? |
| Dimension | Required evidence |
|---|---|
| State coherence | Entity, date, obligation, exception, and termination consistency |
| Grounding | Citation precision/recall, passage support, source freshness |
| Uncertainty | ECE, Brier score, risk-coverage, abstention quality |
| Robustness | Paraphrase, missing evidence, conflicting evidence, adversarial clauses |
| Reproducibility | Model hash, data manifest, seeds, prompts, verifier version |
| Operations | Latency, throughput, VRAM, failure recovery, audit-log completeness |
| Threat | Primary controls | Required evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Indirect injection | Instruction/evidence separation, tool allow-list, content sanitization | Red-team corpus, tool-call logs, attack success rate |
| Cross-user leakage | Tenant isolation, RBAC, encryption, scoped indices | Penetration test, access review, isolation tests |
| Memory leakage | No default customer-data training, adapter isolation, output filtering | Extraction audit, training-data manifest |
| Stale authority | Versioned sources, jurisdiction metadata, revocation process | Freshness report, source lineage, temporal tests |
| Verifier bypass | Canonical parser, adversarial verifier tests, independent semantic checks | Unit-test coverage, failure cases, verifier hash |
| Automation bias | Mandatory review for high-severity actions, visible evidence and abstention | Reviewer study, seeded-error detection, escalation rate |
LLM World Models
Large language model world models predict how environments change so agents can plan, learn, and evaluate actions before execution.
See all 31 papers