Answer Engineering: Local Trajectory Editing for Protocol-Constrained Decision Making in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.21121v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can produce confident but protocol-invalid answers in domains where procedural compliance is critical. This paper presents Answer Engineering, a deterministic runtime and authoring layer that applies localized rule-guided interventions to the visible reasoning trajectory during standard autoregressive generation, without retraining, modifying model weights, or performing global search. The method is evaluated on a controlled c