Record-carrying state
The current state plus a record of how it was reached. A utility on it can value routes; a utility on the bare state cannot.
Role. Target. Graph node hstate.
A finite history can be written into an enlarged state, and a state utility on that enlargement can reproduce a history preference.
— Frames relations note
The record can be the full history, a transcript, or a few route bits. Every route reward is exact on records: a step scores the record value after it minus the record value before (route_exact_on_records). So the round trip that no bare-state utility can value (stateCycleIncompat) has a value here.
The escape works only for what the record sees. If two walks leave the same record and differ in route value, no record utility represents the difference (unrecorded_route_not_representable).
Correction is the same. A record utility can accept a correction to a worse outcome by compensating the corrected branch, but then it does not care whether the channel survives (soares_indifference_no_preservation). If the record does not see the channel, protecting the channel is the same preference as wanting to be corrected (hstateCorrectionIncompat).
Whether the record escapes the instrumental-convergence counting argument depends on what it holds. Over observation records the tendency stays and can get stronger; over action-observation records in a deterministic world it disappears for generic utilities (Turner 2021). What the record always changes is what a chosen utility can express.