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Sprint projectAug 16, 2026Santa Clara

Coherent Values, or the Frame That Asked? From Preference Transitivity to Identifiability

Alex Kwon

Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Reframing a question reverses up to 52% of a model's strongly-held pairwise preferences, and 29% under near-deterministic decoding, while transitivity, the coherence criterion behind claims of emergent value systems, registers nothing. Five models, a frozen 45-pair battery, eight frames, no LLM judge. We propose an identifiability gate separating coverage from coherence, validated on four agents whose mechanism we set: up to 40% of a preference graph is not attributable to the model at all.

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  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
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  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
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  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
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  1. The rigor here really stands out! Preregistering before the first run, no LLM judges anywhere, and openly listing which claims you did not show.

    Thoughts :

    1. Only 2 of 5 models clear the noise floor, and "up to 52%" seems stronger than warranted.
    2. 3 repeats is the binding constraint, your own validation shows sensitivity jumps from 0.67 to 1.00 at 5 repeats, so more repeats would help a lot?
    3. Would love to see a second domain dataset beyond charity choices.

Cite this project

@misc{kwon2026coherent,
  title = {{Coherent Values, or the Frame That Asked? From Preference Transitivity to Identifiability}},
  author = {Alex Kwon},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  note = {Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/coherent-values-or-the-frame-that-asked-from-preference-transitivity-to-identifiability-q13e}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/coherent-values-or-the-frame-that-asked-from-preference-transitivity-to-identifiability-q13e}
}

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