PPS Signature Template · Version 1.0

Title Bridge360 PPS Signature Template v1.0: A Process–Policy–State Governance Object for Agentic AI Runs

Author:  Agerico Montecillo De Villa, University of the Philippines in Diliman

Description:  Template for PPS = Process–Policy–State signature: a threshold-bearing record that certifies whether an agent run remained governable within the Spine Corridor.

This record deposits the Bridge360 PPS Signature Template v1.0, a formal governance object designed to evaluate agentic AI runs not only by output quality but by corridor compliance, threshold discipline, artifact traceability, rollback readiness, and anti-Potemkin auditability. It is a component of the Bridge360 Metatheory Model, a unified governance algorithm for AI and complex systems developed at the University of the Philippines.

What the template is

The PPS Signature — read as Process–Policy–State — is a run-level audit record. It captures what an agent attempted, what actions it actually took, what governance constraints were active, what thresholds were approached or crossed, what artifacts were produced or modified, and whether the run remained inside its declared Spine Corridor. It is a governance object, not merely a logging object: its purpose is to make the difference between a fluent answer and a governable run formally legible.

The imagination / hallucination distinction

A core theoretical contribution of this template is the operationalization of Bridge360's mathematical distinction between imagination and hallucination — two concepts that most AI governance frameworks conflate or leave undefined.

Under Bridge360 formal definitions:

• Imagination is a low-data predictive operator that generates action-relevant candidate futures while keeping internal model updates within an entropy budget (compute, attention, memory, contradictions, and maintenance cost). Formally: given sparse data D, model state M, predictor Π, entropy cost function C(·), and allowable budget B, imagination produces F = Π(M, D) such that predictive usefulness U(F) is sufficient to guide action and budget compliance C(ΔM) ≤ B is maintained. This is declared exploratory operation — controlled leakage with explicit Caveat Vector population.

• Hallucination is the same generative process without budget discipline and without declaring that the declared spine has been left. It is not primarily an epistemic failure (being wrong) but a governance-positional failure: the run claims corridor compliance it does not have. In template terms, hallucination is identified by the combination leakage_type: undeclared_drift concurrent with corridor_status: within_bounds — the anti-Potemkin tripwire fires on exactly this signature.

This distinction maps onto E. O. Wilson's eusociality thesis as extended through Bridge360: feedback loops (error-correction, compression selection, contradiction management) are the mechanism that keeps imagination inside the entropy budget and prevents drift into hallucination. Social groups and institutions are, under this framework, biological and cultural strategies for entropy-cost reduction via collective governance.

Schema structure

The YAML schema is organized in seven blocks, all non-optional at medium stakes level or above:

1. Metadata — run identity, operator type, task class, stakes level
2. Objective — declared goal, action scope, truth status mode, completion criterion
3. Corridor — Spine Corridor declaration, spine_declaration_mode (certified / exploratory / undeclared), Caveat Vector
4. Imagination/Hallucination Gate — operating mode, leakage_type, budget compliance, data scarcity flag, Potemkin check, narrative drift risk, IH verdict and rationale
5. Process trace — total steps, tool calls, decision points, recursion depth, branch count
6. Policy trace — active governance rules, permissions profile, escalation rules, source policy
7. State trace — seven quantitative governance indicators (entropy budget, fragility, leakage, contradiction pressure, uncertainty load, source sufficiency, confidence floor), each expressed as observed/limit ratios

Verdict logic

The template produces one of four dispositions: Accept (all ratios below 1.00, IH gate clear), Accept with caveat (no hard breach, warning-band variables or declared exploratory mode), Quarantine (threshold breached or undeclared drift detected), or Reject (corridor breach confirmed, hallucination tripwire fired). Scorecard ratios below 0.70 are normal band; 0.70–0.90 are warning; above 0.90 are near-tripwire; above 1.00 are breach.

Relationship to Bridge360 Metatheory Model

This template operationalizes §2 (Caveat Vector), §3 (Band A/B/C classification), §4 (hard tripwires including anti-Potemkin), §5–§7 (action-guidance layer) of the Bridge360 Unified Governance Algorithm. It is designed to be used alongside the Bridge360 Stability Dossier (SDI) for runs that involve interventions or corridor change claims. The full algorithm specification is available at: https://zenodo.org/records/17851815

Intended users

AI system operators, governance auditors, agentic pipeline designers, and researchers developing formal accountability frameworks for LLM-based systems. The template is domain-agnostic and has been tested in policy analysis, geopolitical advisory, and scientific commentary contexts.

Version notes

v1.0 establishes the core schema and IH gate. Planned v1.1 additions include: explicit Agency Index, stake-weighted threshold scaling, rollback semantics block, Band A/B/C classification per Bridge360 §3, K-gated compressibility check, and measurement_protocol sub-fields per state variable. v2.0 will add multi-agent signatures, cross-run inheritance, adversarial perturbation records, artifact provenance hashes, and a policy-conflict resolution layer.

Keywords

AI governance, agentic systems, hallucination detection, imagination, entropy budget, corridor compliance, audit trail, Bridge360, Metatheory Model, PPS signature, caveat vector, anti-Potemkin, spine corridor, leakage, eusociality, LLM governance, provenance, threshold discipline

Resource type: Software / Model documentation

License: [specify your preferred license — CC BY 4.0 recommended for maximum reuse]

Related identifiers:

• Is supplement to: https://zenodo.org/records/17851815 (Bridge360 Metatheory Model full specification)

Version: 1.0

Language: English

A few notes on this description. The length sits in the upper range for Zenodo records — appropriate here because the template introduces a non-standard theoretical construct (the IH gate) that reviewers and users need to understand before the schema makes sense. If Zenodo's community guidelines for your target community (e.g. cs.AI, or a social science community) prefer shorter descriptions, the section on eusociality and the schema structure walkthrough can be trimmed to one paragraph each without losing the essential claims.

The Related Identifiers field linking back to the full Bridge360 algorithm specification is important — it positions this as a component deposit rather than a standalone, which is the accurate relationship and helps Zenodo's citation graph connect the two records.