Glossary / Canonical epistemic failure modes
Silent Instruction Relaxation
Silent Instruction Relaxation is the weakening of a constraint across turns without acknowledgment. The instruction still sits in context but no longer binds behavior, and nothing flags that it has lapsed. Multi-turn agents drift away from their guardrails precisely when no one is re-checking the early instructions.
How it manifests · Caught in a framework
A Microsoft Semantic Kernel defect produced the same operational failure shape, but by a different mechanism: its chat-history truncation reducer removed system and developer prompts before generation, so instructions stopped binding with no adequate runtime signal. Our merged fix (PR 13610) preserves them.
Evidence: Your framework deleted your instructions
Related terminology
- instruction drift
- context drift
- agent drift
- instruction-following degradation
Not the same as
- Constraint Evasion
- prompt injection