Published April 3, 2026 | Version v3
Preprint Open

PALS's Law: A Formal Specification of LLM Output Unreliability as an Architectural Invariant

Authors/Creators

  • 1. Independent

Description

PALS's Law is an engineering principle asserting that LLM output error is not an exceptional condition but a statistical invariant of the model class, and that any system failing to treat it as such contains an architectural defect — regardless of how correct the output appears at inspection time.

The document provides: a formal operative claim (non-negligible expected error rate across realistic distributions), a 9-class error taxonomy, a pipeline compounding corollary, 5 architectural corollaries, and copy-paste practitioner artifacts (contract blocks, inline banners, CLAUDE.md integration).

Version 1.5.4 — includes reference verification pass, 12 cited references (8 empirical, 4 theoretical), and machine-readable schema/report/certificate JSON.

This version: Full LaTeX/PDF typeset with proper tables, equations, and table of contents. Includes .tex source for reproducibility.

Notes

Machine-readable artifacts included: pals_law_schema.json (symbol table), pals_law_report.json (reference verification report), pals_law_certificate.json (integrity certificate). Document generated with assistance from Claude (Anthropic).

Files

PALS_LAW-v1.5.4.pdf

Files (374.6 kB)

Name Size Download all
md5:2e7ef44aaddb71f75855100c1dffe7f5
299.6 kB Preview Download
md5:259b36a707405a49db6c777df09da479
35.2 kB Download
md5:af0133c9184ce7b9fb9df5a1cb37dd8c
770 Bytes Preview Download
md5:541d49191c5e1b9dcd1fdd0d775dd334
22.3 kB Preview Download
md5:791952317319636e3fd64018b371a3e5
16.7 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Related works

References
10.1145/3618260.3649777 (DOI)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11817 (URL)