memory: lv-bronte gated — voice axis fails, ship decision open

Records the full v2 gate result and three findings that outlive the ship call:

1. The effect is UNDERPOWERED, not absent. Both candidates closed 48-52% of the
   achievable span to held-out Bronte and beat base on every individual seed, but
   the gaps sit under the measured floor. Sensitivity floor stated so the negative
   is falsifiable: cannot resolve better than ~0.251 delta_cb at 30 beats x 4 seeds.
   Cause is structural — 81 val pairs against Hemingway's 200, from a 678k-word
   corpus against 994k — and neither more beats nor more seeds fixes it.

2. A DEFECT IN THE v2 RULE. The floor is the largest within-arm spread across ALL
   arms, so adding a third noisier arm raised the bar that failed the clean one.
   Run as a two-arm gate the floor would have been 0.092 and the candidate would
   have cleared at 2.1x. Deliberately NOT exploited — choosing the floor that
   passes your preferred answer is the failure pre-registration exists to prevent —
   but the rule should state whether the floor spans the compared pair or every arm
   present. As written, a verdict depends on which other arms you happened to run.

3. The two-epochs-on-a-three-epoch-schedule recipe did NOT transfer. Bronte's two
   minima are 0.0022 apart against a 0.0046 jitter; epoch 2 buys nothing over epoch
   1. The epoch-3 collapse (+0.075, ~16x jitter) is the only robust part.

The outlier seed was diagnosed rather than waved away: a repeat-5gram degeneracy
probe is uniform at 0.0078-0.0102 across every seed and both arms, so it is genuine
delta_cb variance and the floor stands.

persistent-memory.d/2026-09-17-lv-bronte-gate.md

@@ -0,0 +1,78 @@
+# `[2026-09-17]` lv-bronte: corpus gated for real, adapter trained, v2 gate FAILS the voice axis — ship call is the operator's
+
+**Status: trained and gated, NOT shipped.** The decision is open and belongs to the operator.
+
+## The gate result, in full
+
+| axis | result | numbers |
+|---|---|---|
+| **A. VOICE** | ❌ **FAIL** (both candidates) | ckpt925 +0.210, ckpt475 +0.193 vs base — both **under** the 0.251 measured noise floor |
+| **B. NOT COPIED** | ✅ PASS | ckpt475 **0.00 hit-rate, max 0 — identical to the never-saw-it control**; ckpt925 0.01, max 8. Positive control saturates at 160, so the detector is not blind |
+| **C. NO DAMAGE** | ✅ PASS | ran-on +0.15 against a 0.400 floor |
+
+```
+same-author target (held-out Brontë vs itself)   delta_cb 0.338   <- best achievable
+ckpt925                                                   0.531
+ckpt475                                                   0.548
+base-unadapted                                            0.741
+```
+
+⭐ **THE EFFECT LOOKS REAL AND SUBSTANTIAL; THE INSTRUMENT CANNOT CERTIFY IT.** The reachable
+span is 0.741 → 0.338 = 0.403, and the adapters closed **48–52% of everything achievable**.
+Both beat base on *every individual seed*. This is an UNDERPOWERED result, not a null one —
+and a "no effect" without its floor is unfalsifiable, so: **this method cannot resolve a voice
+improvement smaller than ~0.251 delta_cb at 30 beats × 4 seeds on this corpus.**
+
+⭐⭐ **THE CAUSE IS STRUCTURAL: Brontë's val split yields 81 pairs (44 in-band) against
+Hemingway's 200**, because the corpus is 678k words against 994k. Maxing the fixture 30 → 44
+beats would shrink the floor by only ~√1.47 ≈ 1.2× (to ~0.21, against a 0.21 gap) — still
+marginal. **More SEEDS would not help either: the floor is a RANGE statistic, and ranges widen
+with more samples.** There is no cheap fix.
+
+## ⚠ A DEFECT IN THE v2 RULE ITSELF, worth fixing before the next author
+
+The floor is defined as the **largest within-arm seed spread across ALL arms**. Measured here:
+
+```
+base-unadapted   0.772 0.813 0.751 0.772   spread 0.062
+ckpt475          0.670 0.631 0.604 0.578   spread 0.092
+ckpt925          0.776 0.584 0.525 0.620   spread 0.251   <- sets the floor, on ONE seed
+```
+
+So **adding a third, noisier arm raised the bar that failed the clean one.** Run as the
+two-arm gate (base + ckpt475) the floor would have been 0.092 and +0.193 would have cleared
+at 2.1×. This was NOT exploited — picking the floor that passes your preferred answer is the
+threshold-chosen-after-seeing-the-numbers failure the pre-registration exists to prevent — but
+the rule should say whether the floor is computed over the compared pair or over every arm
+present. As written, a candidate's verdict depends on which *other* arms you happened to run.
+
+**The outlier was diagnosed, not waved away.** Degeneracy probe (fraction of a generation made
+of its most repeated 5-gram) is uniform across every seed and both arms, 0.0078–0.0102. Seed
+1234 is not a collapsed generation; delta_cb genuinely has that variance for that arm.
+
+## Which checkpoint, if it ships: **ckpt475**
+
+The two are 0.017 apart on voice — far inside any floor, i.e. indistinguishable. On the axes
+that DO resolve, ckpt475 wins both: memorisation identical to the control (ckpt925 has a
+verbatim 8-gram hit), and **2.7× tighter seed-to-seed variance** (0.092 vs 0.251) with no
+degeneracy to explain the difference — consistent with ckpt925 sitting nearer the overfit
+boundary. Given a coin-flip on voice, take the one that provably did not memorise.
+
+⭐ **THE RECIPE DID NOT TRANSFER.** Yarros and Hemingway both found their minimum inside
+epoch two. Brontë's minima are step 475 (ep 1.00, 2.6107) and step 925 (ep 1.96, 2.6129) —
+**0.0022 apart against a 0.0046 median neighbour jitter, i.e. indistinguishable**. Epoch 2
+buys Brontë NOTHING over epoch 1. What IS robust is the epoch-3 collapse: +0.075, ~16× jitter.
+Do not carry "two epochs on a three-epoch schedule" to a new author as settled.
+
+## Artefacts
+
+`gx10:~/lv-bronte/` (corpus-clean, corpus-renamed, entities-final.json, pairs/, beats-bronte-30.json),
+`gx10:~/r49-runs/bronte-4b-pairs-3ep/` (57 checkpoints kept), `gx10:~/r49-runs/bronte-eval/`
+(three arms × 120 generations, memorization.txt, voice_distance.txt, score.*.txt).
+Commits `fc834a8` `533cc0c` `7964d07` `e9e8c40` `8bb7686`.
+
+⚠ Two output labels in `voice_distance.py` are hardcoded Yarros strings — it prints
+"reference: held-out Yarros" and a boilerplate "Base < Instruct" corroboration line. The
+NUMBERS are Brontë's; those two labels are not. Not yet fixed.
+
+Related: [[2026-09-16-lv-voices-line]], [[2026-09-16-lv-hemingway-corpus]], [[2026-09-16-voices-seat-lora]].

persistent-memory.md

@@ -152,6 +152,7 @@ before this session began. ⚠ **Do NOT commit them** — untouched and delibera
 
 ## Recent decisions
 
+- `[2026-09-17]` ⭐⭐ **lv-bronte trained and gated — v2 gate FAILS the VOICE axis; the ship call is open and the operator's.** Both candidates closed 48–52% of the achievable distance to Brontë but +0.193/+0.210 sit under a 0.251 noise floor set by ONE outlier seed in the arm not being shipped; cause is structural (81 val pairs vs Hemingway's 200) and not cheaply fixable. ckpt475 is the pick if it ships. The two-epoch recipe did NOT transfer. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-17-lv-bronte-gate.md`
 - `[2026-09-16]` ⭐⭐ **Instruction-pair SFT BEATS raw-text for author voice, and the raw-text incumbent never cleared its own control (+0.141 against a 0.153 floor).** `lv-yarros` shipped; the v1 decision rule was amended by the operator after measurement showed it gated on axes the unadapted carrier already maxes. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-16-lv-voices-line.md`
 - `[2026-09-16]` ⭐ **voices-seat live: one carrier, N `lv-<author>` LoRA adapters, hot-swap measured at 0.24 s.** LoRA costs 24.3% of decode against a 0.1% A-vs-A floor and is worth paying; `--gpu-memory-utilization` is a request against TOTAL VRAM and only a pinned KV makes it predictive. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-16-voices-seat-lora.md`
 - `[2026-09-16]` ⭐ **lv-hemingway corpus gated at 994,760 words — and half the catalogue had to be EXCLUDED.** 169,759 words of measured 90–96% collection duplication, a Sherwood Anderson parody, and the author's own name 95 times in publisher back matter; the gender resolver needed a corpus base-rate correction to stop reading women as men. → `persistent-memory.d/2026-09-16-lv-hemingway-corpus.md`