FEDI: Fion-Enhanced Distributed Intelligence (GA 1.2.0) A Physics-Inspired Architecture for Epistemic AI

Current AI systems lack epistemic coherence, leading to hallucinations, internally inconsistent reasoning, and brittleness to distribution shifts. We introduce FEDI (Fion-Enhanced Distributed Intelligence), a distributed cognitive architecture in which reasoning emerges from informational stability rather than statistical correlation. The architecture is inspired by informational-physics principles and implements autonomous cognitive nodes — Fion Units (FUs) — that maintain stable knowledge states through mutual-information coupling, redundancy minimization, and the Loop-5 Cycle, a five-stage epistemic validation process enforcing geometric consistency, spectral stability, scaling invariance, coherence integration, and falsifiability testing. This work makes three main contributions: (1) a distributed epistemic architecture for consistency-driven reasoning, (2) a deterministic and fully reproducible benchmark pipeline, and (3) experimental results from a reference implementation indicating that architectural validation cycles can substantially reduce hallucinations. Within the reproducible benchmark pipeline, FEDI achieves a 75% reduction in hallucination rate compared to a strong transformer baseline (0.8% vs 3.2%) and an epistemic coherence score of φ = 0.91 (baseline 0.73). The complete research software, configuration snapshots, and benchmark data are archived on the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/254s8/, ensuring full reproducibility and independent verification.