arXiv:2605.05103v4 Announce Type: replace-cross

Abstract: We introduce the \textbf{Concept Field} of a text corpus: a local drift field with pointwise uncertainty, estimated in sentence-embedding space from the deltas between consecutive sentences. Given a candidate sentence transition, we score its agreement with the field by $\zeta$, the mean absolute z-distance between the observed delta and the field's local statistical estimate, giving a quantitative measure of groundedness. The score is model agnostic and corpus-attributable, providing traces to corpus semantics either supporting or refuting groundedness. We drive the computation with the introduction of a \textbf{Vector Sequence Database (VSDB)} that stores embeddings together with sequence-position and next-delta metadata. We demonstrate this approach on two large-scale settings: groundedness detection over the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, and ungroundedness (novelty) detection over Project Gutenberg, where we show Concept Fields achieve strong selective classification performance under a grounded / ungrounded / unsure triage policy. Unlike retrieval-centric baselines, the resulting coverage-risk behavior shows similar empirical coverage-performance trends in the two evaluated domains. Concept Fields provide a fast, lightweight, and interpretable signal for groundedness, complementary to LLM-as-judge and white-box detectors.