Which Rules Matter Now?

Abstract

Before an intelligent system can decide whether an action is allowed, it must first know which rules the action has approached. A single proposed action can implicate several policy regimes at once. Their requirements may stack, overlap, or qualify one another, yet many remain written in natural language while the action itself arrives as an incomplete description of intent. The first problem is not judgment. It is attention.

Policy-centroid routing creates a layer before adjudication. It compresses expressions within each policy regime into one or more representative centroids, places the proposed action in the same semantic space, applies a declared measure, and routes every regime crossing a declared threshold to authoritative review. Several regimes may trigger at once. The output is a review agenda, not permission, prohibition, legality, breach, compliance, certification, or enforcement.

The paper develops six falsifiable propositions and seven follow-on studies comparing the hypothesis with structured workflows, lexical and semantic retrieval, hierarchical and direct classification, and selective prediction under matched review burden. The studies are designed to identify where policy geometry recovers applicable regimes, where compression loses rare or overlapping obligations, and where the mechanism should abstain. The paper includes a synthetic worked example and reports no empirical efficacy result.

Fields and Methods

artificial intelligence, policy routing, human review, semantic representation, selective prediction.

• policy-regime representations compressed into one or more representative centroids
• proposed-action representation in the same semantic space
• a declared similarity measure and routing threshold
• routing every threshold crossing to authoritative review as a review agenda
• a synthetic worked example and a research program of six falsifiable propositions with seven follow-on studies

Collaborator Profile

Researchers in artificial intelligence, AI governance, human-in-the-loop review, policy and compliance systems, information retrieval, classification, and selective prediction who can test the paper's routing propositions under declared review burdens.

Validation Needed

• Compare the routing hypothesis with structured workflows, lexical retrieval, semantic retrieval, hierarchical classification, direct classification, and selective prediction under matched review burden.
• Measure where policy-regime compression loses rare, overlapping, or qualifying obligations.
• Test abstention conditions and failure modes before any claim about practical efficacy.
• Keep routing output separate from authoritative adjudication, permission, prohibition, legality, breach, compliance, certification, and enforcement.

Publication Posture

This is a public institute preprint, not a peer-reviewed finding. Its permanent arXiv record is arXiv:2608.30757 in cs.AI, cross-listed cs.CY. The arXiv record is the primary public source.

Citation

Thomson D. Nguy. Which Rules Matter Now? Policy-Centroid Routing Before an Intelligent System Acts. arXiv:2608.30757 [cs.AI, cs.CY].

Research Correspondence

For collaboration inquiries or research correspondence about this work, contact contact@theradiantinstitute.org.