{"id":140,"identifier":"LOR-00140","url":"https://lifeofresearch.com/preprints/140","title":"PECA v3: Evidence-Gated Anticipatory Execution: Separating Requirement Compliance, Predictive Utility, and Commit Authorization in AI Agents","abstract":"Anticipation can help an AI agent prepare useful work before a requirement is fully specified, but a predictor can also create the very obligations the agent then tries to satisfy. PECA v3 refactors Prefix-Conditioned Execution and Cumulative Audit around a strict separation among confirmed requirements, provisional predictions, and the mutable artifact with its provenance. The controller preserves the state triple (R_h,R_p,S), but makes the distinction operational: compliance is judged only against active, evidence-supported requirements in R_h; predictions in R_p are evaluated separately for utility, calibration, and waste; and external or consequential changes pass through action-specific authorization and commit gates. Each action carries a contract covering evidence, preconditions, expected effects, verification, side effects, reversibility, and commit criteria. The design favors preparation useful across several plausible futures, permits isolated branch-specific speculation only when its expected value is positive, and combines material-cycle checkpoints with event-triggered reviews. The nested 3-6-9 cadence is retained as an ablatable scheduling hypothesis, not a source of correctness. This paper defines the architecture and a controlled evaluation plan. It reports no live-model performance results and makes no claim that the proposed controller is superior until matched, independently evaluated experiments establish that fact.","authors":[{"name":"RM369","affiliation":"","orcid":""}],"type":"preprint","license":"CC-BY-4.0","keywords":["AI agents","instruction following","speculative execution","runtime verification","auditability","action contracts","reversibility","reward hacking"],"publication_date":"2026-10-26","version":2,"views":26,"downloads":9,"created_at":"2026-10-26 08:08:10","doi":"","source":"","source_url":"","files":[{"id":148,"name":"PECA_v3_Evidence_Gated_Anticipatory_Execution.pdf","size":81066,"mime":"application/pdf","downloads":8,"download_url":"https://lifeofresearch.com/preprints/140/files/148/PECA_v3_Evidence_Gated_Anticipatory_Execution.pdf"}]}