Relationship Between Intelligence and Coherence

Determine whether more intelligent agents behave less coherently, as conjectured in prior work and described as a matter of dispute in the literature.

Background

The paper discusses disagreement in the literature over how coherence changes with model capability. Prior work conjectured that increasing intelligence may make agents less coherent, whereas other studies of machine preferences have reported improved consistency with scale. The paper further notes that the relationship is disputed and evaluates related consistency measures, but does not establish a definitive resolution of the general question.

References

Whether coherence rises or falls with capability is currently a matter of dispute. \citet{sohldickstein2023hotmess} conjectured that more intelligent agents behave less coherently.

— An Investigation of Model Coherence: Narrow Finetunes Contradict Themselves Under Resampling  (2610.12129 - Graham et al., 8 Oct 2026) in Section 2, paragraph “Coherence and capability”