“Reticent Quintessence” RQI Intelligence
Reticent Quintessence Intelligence (RQI): Latent Epistemic Risk as a Unifying Principle for Representation, Computation, and Abstention “ The communication of uncertainty ” P. A. Baron Independent Researcher, Reticent Quintessence ⸻ Abstract We introduce Reticent Quintessence Intelligence (RQI), a framework for learning and decision-making under uncertainty in which epistemic risk is explicitly represented as a latent variable. Unlike conventional approaches that estimate uncertainty only at the output level, RQI defines a dedicated latent representation z^{-} that encodes epistemic insufficiency and predicts the likelihood of model error. We show how a single learned risk signal r(x) , derived from z^{-} , can unify three previously distinct problems: (i) selective prediction via abstention, (ii) interaction-level sparsity in attention, and (iii) computational efficiency through risk-guided gating. All components emerge from minimizing a unifi...