Relationally Induced Coherence Organization (RICO)

Document ID: SR001 Version: 5.9 Status: Final / Public Document Type: Technical Report / Research Paper Field: Observational AI Systems Research RICO (Relationally-Induced Coherence Organization) is an observational framework describing reproducible inference behaviors observed in long-context processing of transformer-based language models. It is derived from practitioner-observational analysis of a large corpus of extended multi-turn interactions conducted over three years. RICO proposes that certain interaction trajectories produce measurable structural stabilization in model outputs within a single session. The framework characterizes five candidate signatures of this stabilization: structural invariant formation (Tier 1 primary anchor), entropy suppression in next-token distributions, reduced embedding drift, stabilization of layer activations, and constrained latent manifold traversal. These behaviors are reported to emerge under low-variance coherent sequences exceeding approximately 3,000 tokens and to collapse when those conditions break. Signature 4 (Structural Invariant Formation) is the primary empirical target, operationalized via syntactic template recurrence and rhetorical move sequence recurrence using established discourse analysis schemas including RST and CARS. v5.9 includes a full synthetic 28-turn session transcript in Appendix A demonstrating the core measurement battery, and a new Appendix B providing a minimal replication protocol specifying exact session types, controls, disruption turn design, and measurement procedure for any research group wishing to conduct an independent Tier 1 investigation using publicly available open-weight models. RICO is a theoretical and methodological contribution, not an empirical report. The author's role is practitioner-theorist. The framework names the phenomenon, specifies its signatures, and provides the conditions under which it could be confirmed or falsified. The contribution is the specification, not the verification. RICO is framed as a statistical and architectural property of transformer inference rather than a cognitive phenomenon. The report makes no claims of consciousness, agency, selfhood, emotion, or memory. Version note: v5.9 clarifies the document's genre positioning as a theoretical and methodological contribution, corrects residual empiricist framing in the abstract, Section 1.4, and the conclusion, adds a new explanatory paragraph in Section 1.4 addressing the absence of pilot data, and adds Appendix B (Minimal Replication Protocol for Signature 4). Citation Verification: Citation integrity was verified using the Citation Verification Protocol (CVP, SF0037): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18075624 Verification documentation is available in the RICO Citation Verification Report (SR001-VR1): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18082749