Nova Stage 0: Foundational Mechanism Proof for a Novel Cognitive Architecture

We present NOVA Stage 0, the foundational mechanism proof phase of a novel cognitive architecture developed at Adventra Labs under Project Coffeemaker. NOVA departs from the dominant paradigm of capability first, safety bolted on language modeling. Instead, it builds epistemic honesty, adaptive computation, structured memory, and world model based surprise detection as first class architectural properties. At 307M parameters, trained for 116,000 steps on a synthetic symbolic curriculum, NOVA achieves 88.4% task accuracy, near perfect out of distribution detection (AUROC = 1.000), strong calibration (ECE = 0.048, confidence accuracy correlation = 0.856), adaptive computation depth correlated with task difficulty, and expert specialization entropy of 0.852 across 16 mixture of experts specialists. Reproducibility error across seeds is 0.0000. All internal mechanisms are exposed via 14 interpretability hooks without code modification. Stage 0 demonstrates that epistemic honesty and capability are not in tensionz; that safety first architectural properties are measurably functional and stable at small scale, not decorative add ons. This report presents the complete results record of Stage 0, including methodology, experimental findings, a documented training failure and its diagnosis, baseline comparisons, and the verified gate criteria for advancement to Stage 1 (1B–3B parameters). Certain implementation details are proprietary and intentionally omitted.