Temporal Reset Anchors: Proactively Mitigating Concept Incongruence Through State-Aware Role-Play Intervention

Building on Bai et al.'s work on concept incongruence, this research addresses temporal representation shifts during role-play by introducing Temporal Reset Anchors (TRAs) — specialized prompt injections that act as state restoration points after incongruence events such as character death. Unlike reactive fixes, TRAs proactively prevent temporal corruption by explicitly re-establishing temporal boundaries within the model's state. The approach synthesizes insights from anchor functions and temporal markers to treat temporal incongruence as a stateful corruption requiring explicit intervention. Evaluation involves testing TRAs against complex temporal anomalies beyond death scenarios, with potential scalability to auto-generate TRAs for diverse role-play contexts using temporal logic rules. The framework aims to maintain conceptual coherence in stateful AI interactions broadly, including therapeutic chatbots and long-term narrative agents.

References:

1. Concept Incongruence: An Exploration of Time and Death in Role Playing. Xiaoyan Bai, Ike Peng, Aditya Singh, Chenhao Tan (2025). arXiv.org.
2. Anchor function: a type of benchmark functions for studying language models. Zhongwang Zhang, Zhiwei Wang, Junjie Yao, Zhangchen Zhou, Xiaolong Li, E. Weinan, Z. Xu (2024). arXiv.org.