EHD — Can LLM Agents Care About the World?

Abstract

This paper introduces exocentric homeostatic deliberation (EHD): a framework in which a persistent LLM agent's primary welfare term is anchored to an externally monitored, auditable world-state rather than to internal comfort variables. The hope term is defined over an interventional distribution under explicit structural-causal modelling assumptions. Pragmatic and epistemic value enter the scoring rule as independently calibrated additive terms. Governance is handled through hard feasibility constraints and a soft penalty term, both inspectable without access to internal operational variables.