Telogenesis: Goal Is All U Need

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09476v1
• Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:28:45 GMT
• Title: Telogenesis: Goal Is All U Need
• Abstract summary: We propose a priority function that generates observation targets from three gaps: ignorance, surprise, and staleness.<n>We validate this in two systems: a minimal attention-allocation environment (2,000 runs) and a modular, partially observable world (500 runs.<n>A key finding is metric-dependent reversal: under global prediction error, coverage-based rotation wins; under change detection latency, priority-guided allocation wins, with advantage growing monotonically with dimensionality.
• Score: 8.585574846949628
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Goal-conditioned systems assume goals are provided externally. We ask whether attentional priorities can emerge endogenously from an agent's internal cognitive state. We propose a priority function that generates observation targets from three epistemic gaps: ignorance (posterior variance), surprise (prediction error), and staleness (temporal decay of confidence in unobserved variables). We validate this in two systems: a minimal attention-allocation environment (2,000 runs) and a modular, partially observable world (500 runs). Ablation shows each component is necessary. A key finding is metric-dependent reversal: under global prediction error, coverage-based rotation wins; under change detection latency, priority-guided allocation wins, with advantage growing monotonically with dimensionality (d = -0.95 at N=48, p < 10^-6). Detection latency follows a power law in attention budget, with a steeper exponent for priority-guided allocation (0.55 vs. 0.40). When the decay rate is made learnable per variable, the system spontaneously recovers environmental volatility structure without supervision (t = 22.5, p < 10^-6). We demonstrate that epistemic gaps alone, without external reward, suffice to generate adaptive priorities that outperform fixed strategies and recover latent environmental structure.

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