coherencefocused

Coherencefocused refers to a theoretical and practical emphasis in artificial intelligence and cognitive systems on maintaining internal coherence across reasoning and decision processes. As a design and evaluation lens, it prioritizes logical consistency, traceable justification, and alignment between goals, beliefs, and actions. Proponents view coherence as a stabilizing property that helps systems avoid contradictory conclusions and reduces the risk of incoherent outputs in complex tasks.

Origin and usage: The term emerged in discussions surrounding AI alignment, interpretability, and safety in the 2020s, where researchers described coherence-focused approaches as complementing emphasis on factual accuracy or surface-level performance. It is used to describe models, evaluation protocols, and tooling that impose coherence constraints during planning, reasoning, or self-reflection.

Principles and methods: Core ideas include explicit coherence constraints, stepwise verification of reasoning, and modular architectures that separate belief formation from action selection. Techniques may include consistency checks across subgoals, logged rationale with verifiability, and evaluation metrics that reward consistency over isolated predictions.

Applications: Applications include robust long-horizon planning, reliable code generation, and safety-critical behavior where predictable, self-consistent outputs are important. It is also discussed as a complement to truthfulness and factual accuracy in evaluation suites.

Limitations and criticisms: Critics note that coherence alone does not guarantee truth or usefulness and may produce defensible but misleading narratives. Measuring coherence is challenging, and enforcing it can reduce creativity or adaptability in certain tasks.

See also: Truthful AI, Explainable AI, Chain-of-thought, Coherence in reasoning.