English

Box Maze: A Process-Control Architecture for Reliable LLM Reasoning

Artificial Intelligence 2026-03-20 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong generative capabilities but remain vulnerable to hallucination and unreliable reasoning under adversarial prompting. Existing safety approaches -- such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and output filtering -- primarily operate at the behavioral level and may lack explicit architectural mechanisms for enforcing reasoning process integrity. This paper proposes the Box Maze framework, a conceptual process-control architecture that decomposes LLM reasoning into three explicit layers: memory grounding, structured inference, and boundary enforcement. We introduce preliminary simulation-based evaluation involving progressive boundary erosion scenarios across multiple heterogeneous LLM systems (DeepSeek-V3, Doubao, Qwen). Results from n=50 adversarial scenarios suggest that explicit cognitive control layers may improve consistency in boundary maintenance, with architectural constraints reducing boundary failure rates from approximately 40% (baseline RLHF) to below 1% under adversarial conditions. While current validation is simulation-based, these preliminary results indicate that process-level control may offer a promising direction for improving reliability in large language model reasoning.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.19182,
  title  = {Box Maze: A Process-Control Architecture for Reliable LLM Reasoning},
  author = {Zou Qiang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.19182},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

10 pages, 5 tables, 0 figures. Conceptual architecture with preliminary simulation-based validation

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:28:36.138Z