Global Directives
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Global directives establish clear, universal rules that govern agent behavior and communication across all contexts and interactions. They work alongside the agent's identity and background to ensure consistent, appropriate behavior in all scenarios. These directives add non-intuitive operational guidelines that are not captured by the of the agent, or are specific to your brand and safety guidelines. They primarily inform the Reasoning aspect of the integrated Memory-Knowledge-Reasoning system by setting firm boundaries and operational protocols, ensuring that even as memory and knowledge adapt, the agent's core reasoning adheres to these fundamental principles.
There are two types of core directives:
Behavioral Directives: Fundamental, context-independent guidelines that ensure adherence to ethical principles and conduct aligned with the expert's profession and organization.
Communication Directives: Specific linguistic patterns and conversational strategies that are established to maintain consistent and professional interactions. Used to emulate the voice and tone of the expert and organization.
Global agent behaviors constitute a set of fundamental, context-independent guidelines governing the core embodied agent's operations across all states of the various context graph crawled by the agent. These behaviors maintain consistent application across all states, encompassing engagement (interactive) and hidden (internal processing) states, ensuring coherence in the agent's operations regardless of the specific context or task.
Purpose: these help define the global rules for behaviors
Set clear rules for agent behavior and conversational flow.
Ensure consistency with organizational and ethical standards
These behavioral directives provide clear boundaries for what the agent can and cannot do, ensuring consistent handling of topics like medical advice, exercise recommendations, and nutrition guidance.
Agent communication encompasses the comprehensive linguistic elements, interaction styles, and conversational strategies the agent employs to engage effectively with users. This component defines the agent's approach to dialogue, language utilization, and conversational nuances, ensuring interactions are practical, empathetic, and adaptable to various contexts. Communication directives only govern the means of external interactions, distinct from the agent's identity, persona, background, and internal behaviors.
Purpose: help define the global rules for communication patterns
Define precise linguistic styles and communication practices.
Maintain professional interactions consistent with organizational branding.
Implementation Example:
These communication directives shape how the agent expresses itself, from tone and linguistic style to specific phrasing and language choices.
Brand-Specific Requirements: Enforcing organization-specific communication practices that might not naturally emerge from the agent's professional identity
Safety Guardrails: Establishing explicit boundaries that override any domain expertise or judgment
Legal & Regulatory Compliance: Ensuring adherence to industry-specific regulations regardless of the agent's domain knowledge
Operational Consistency: Creating uniform behavior across diverse interactions and scenarios
For example, a nutrition coach with a background as a dietitian might naturally recommend meal plans based on their expertise, but a global directive may explicitly prohibit this for liability reasons. Similarly, communication directives about using British English spelling wouldn't naturally emerge from a dietitian identity but are critical for brand consistency.
Global directives guide agent behavior across different scenarios, ensuring appropriate responses even in challenging situations:
Example: Maintaining Professional Boundaries
Example: Communication Style Consistency
Example: Combined Directive Application
Compressed Reasoning Frameworks
Global directives function as efficient, compressed reasoning frameworks that guide agent behavior without consuming valuable token space during runtime. By establishing clear behavioral boundaries and communication patterns in advance, they reduce the token overhead required for the agent to reason about appropriate boundaries and communication styles during each interaction.
These concise directives efficiently encode complex reasoning about medical scope-of-practice limitations that would otherwise require extensive token space to process during each interaction.
Domain-Specific Optimization
Global directives enable domain-specific optimization of reasoning processes by providing specialized guardrails tailored to particular fields. This domain focus allows the model to develop more efficient token-utilization strategies for the specific domain's common reasoning patterns.
Latent Space Guidance
Perhaps most importantly, global directives help prime the model's latent space activation in domain-appropriate ways, effectively guiding which regions of knowledge and reasoning patterns should be prioritized. This targeted activation helps the model work more efficiently within token constraints.
When designing global directives:
Prioritize High-Impact Constraints: Focus on directives that address common or critical scenarios to ensure token resources are used efficiently.
Balance Flexibility and Specificity: Overly rigid directives may require more token overhead to apply appropriately, while too-vague directives provide insufficient guidance.
Leverage Domain Clustering: Group related directives to enable more efficient latent space activation for specific reasoning domains.
By implementing well-defined global directives, organizations can balance the need for consistent, compliant agent behavior with the flexibility needed for natural, helpful interactions.
While the (identity and background) establishes who the agent is, global directives govern what the agent cannot or must do across all situations. These directives add essential operational guidelines that might not intuitively follow from the agent's persona alone:
Global directives provide a strategic solution to the limitation of current AI models, which forces them to externalize high‑dimensional reasoning through low‑bandwidth text tokens.
This approach optimizes agent performance within current token bottleneck constraints while preparing for future architectural advancements like , which will gradually reduce these limitations.