11.6MAApr 9
"Theater of Mind" for LLMs: A Cognitive Architecture Based on Global Workspace TheoryWenlong Shang
Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) operate fundamentally as Bounded-Input Bounded-Output (BIBO) systems. They remain in a passive state until explicitly prompted, computing localized responses without intrinsic temporal continuity. While effective for isolated tasks, this reactive paradigm presents a critical bottleneck for engineering autonomous artificial intelligence. Current multi-agent frameworks attempt to distribute cognitive load but frequently rely on static memory pools and passive message passing, which inevitably leads to cognitive stagnation and homogeneous deadlocks during extended execution. To address this structural limitation, we propose Global Workspace Agents (GWA), a cognitive architecture inspired by Global Workspace Theory. GWA transitions multi-agent coordination from a passive data structure to an active, event-driven discrete dynamical system. By coupling a central broadcast hub with a heterogeneous swarm of functionally constrained agents, the system maintains a continuous cognitive cycle. Furthermore, we introduce an entropy-based intrinsic drive mechanism that mathematically quantifies semantic diversity, dynamically regulating generation temperature to autonomously break reasoning deadlocks. Coupled with a dual-layer memory bifurcation strategy to ensure long-term cognitive continuity, GWA provides a robust, reproducible engineering framework for sustained, self-directed LLM agency.
LGNov 10, 2025
COGNOS: Universal Enhancement for Time Series Anomaly Detection via Constrained Gaussian-Noise Optimization and SmoothingWenlong Shang, Peng Chang
Reconstruction-based methods are a dominant paradigm in time series anomaly detection (TSAD), however, their near-universal reliance on Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss results in statistically flawed reconstruction residuals. This fundamental weakness leads to noisy, unstable anomaly scores with a poor signal-to-noise ratio, hindering reliable detection. To address this, we propose Constrained Gaussian-Noise Optimization and Smoothing (COGNOS), a universal, model-agnostic enhancement framework that tackles this issue at its source. COGNOS introduces a novel Gaussian-White Noise Regularization strategy during training, which directly constrains the model's output residuals to conform to a Gaussian white noise distribution. This engineered statistical property creates the ideal precondition for our second contribution: a Kalman Smoothing Post-processor that provably operates as a statistically optimal estimator to denoise the raw anomaly scores. The synergy between these two components allows COGNOS to robustly separate the true anomaly signal from random fluctuations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that COGNOS is highly effective, delivering an average F-score uplift of 57.9% when applied to 12 diverse backbone models across multiple real-world benchmark datasets. Our work reveals that directly regularizing output statistics is a powerful and generalizable strategy for significantly improving anomaly detection systems.