Replay-Gated Neural Execution: Decoupling Persistent Behavioral Specifications from Neural Realizations in Frozen Language Models

Abstract

Input-conditioned neural interventions raise a runtime question: what persists when one behavioral specification admits multiple actions whose validity depends on execution state? We introduce replay-gated neural execution, separating five objects: a persistent behavioral predicate, its state-indexed certified realization set, a transient action witness, a budget-limited finder, and execution authorization. Candidates undergo isolated FP32/BF16 replay of the frozen model; commitment additionally requires a valid run audit. Experiments on Qwen3-0.6B and SmolLM2-360M-Instruct establish distinct failure modes for these objects. Independent initializations yield distinct certified actions in all 24 tested fixed-state cells. Unchanged SmolLM2 witnesses remain certified in all 128 native states but only 66 of 384 off-diagonal transfers. All 767 archived Qwen witnesses replay successfully, yet a budget-limited finder misses one known-realizable cell in all three prespecified runs. Of 1,141 replay-submitted candidates, 174 fail item certification. A frozen three-tier cascade uses these boundaries to reject uncertified proposals and escalate audit-valid search misses. On 256 previously sealed Qwen Fresh requests, 221 first certify at the lowest-cost tier and all 256 receive audited authorization, with no observed bypass. Relative to frozen full search, the median singleton search-and-certification cost ratio is 0.1055 and P95 is 1.3485, including failed tiers. Within the studied behavioral family on two small models, these results support state-indexed, set-valued execution semantics: specifications persist, search proposes witnesses, and replay certification plus run audit grants execution authority.