Commit Graph
6 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Vuong Hoang 6692701571 docs(voices-seat): every voice prefixes an empty think block unless the caller disables it
Found while smoke-testing the lv-mccarthy ship. Measured live:

  default                 -> '<think>\n\n</think>\n\nThere were no horses in the road...'
  enable_thinking=false   -> 'The sun was hot on the dry riverbed and the stones were red...'

This is the Qwen3-4B-Instruct CHAT TEMPLATE, not an adapter property, so it applies
to lv-yarros, lv-bronte and lv-hemingway equally and has done since this seat went
up on 2026-09-16.

No gate number is affected: gen_beats_chat_yarros.py sets enable_thinking when the
template supports it, so every arm in every r49 gate was generated without the tags.
But a caller that does not pass chat_template_kwargs gets 17 junk characters at the
head of every passage -- and any word-count or in-band check run over that string is
counting the tags as prose. Skaldsong should be checked.
2026-09-21 18:02:56 -07:00
Vuong Hoang 17db37e1cc feat(voices-seat): ship lv-mccarthy (checkpoint-300) as the fourth author voice
Shipped on the operator's standing authorisation, "ship it if the gate passes".
The gate design of record for this line -- the operator's own v2 rule, ratified
2026-09-15 -- passes on all three axes:

  VOICE          +0.177 delta_cb at 3.2x the pairwise floor, the BEST arm of five,
                 and +0.128 at 2.8x on the pre-registered punctuation-stripped
                 secondary read, so ~3/4 of the gain is words rather than marks.
                 Closed 60.8% of the reachable span on an axis deliberately made
                 harder than Bronte's or Hemingway's.
  NOT COPIED     0.12 hit-rate against HELD-OUT McCARTHY'S OWN 0.12 -- 1.0x the
                 author -- with a longest verbatim run of 10 words against the 12
                 genuinely unseen McCarthy shares with the train split by
                 coincidence. All 31 matches READ: stock grammar, name-shaped hits
                 are the renamed inventions, nothing protectable. This matters:
                 McCarthy is in copyright with a living estate.
  NO DAMAGE      ran-on +0.12 against the 0.200 floor, 40% headroom, and the
                 measured minimum across the five-arm ladder.

ckpt300 over ckpt900, the eval-loss minimum: the two-epoch recipe is now 0 for 3,
and this time the curve was CONFIDENT and wrong -- ckpt900 is the minimum and
ckpt300 sits +15.8x the median neighbour jitter above it, yet ckpt300 wins every
axis that resolves (3.2x vs 1.2x voice margin, 2.7x tighter seed spread,
memorisation 1.0x the author vs 1.8x, ran-on 0.13 vs 0.28). On this schedule read
the axes, not the curve.

THE COST IS REAL AND IS WRITTEN INTO THE COMPOSE, THE ADAPTER README AND THE
MEMORY RECORD RATHER THAN GLOSSED. In-band is 0.65 against base's 0.89 and on-beat
0.42 against 0.71 -- 35% of generations miss the requested 90-140 word band against
base's 11%. Axis C is ran-on only and is structurally blind to this; that blindness
was identified and written down before these numbers existed. No checkpoint choice
fixes it: every adapted arm is 33-48% out-of-band and ran-on is non-monotonic in
epoch. If a caller depends on a word budget, expect one generation in three to miss
it, and the fix is a retrain targeting length rather than a different checkpoint.

Rollback is one line and 0.003 s: drop the --lora-modules entry, or POST
/v1/unload_lora_adapter. The other three voices are untouched.
2026-09-21 17:58:23 -07:00
vh 300ecc1276 voices-seat: ship lv-hemingway (ckpt850), and replace the memorisation control that passed it
Live on vllm-voices (fv-ml1 GPU0 :8027) beside voices-base, lv-yarros and lv-bronte.
Healthy 190 s after recreate, four models served, GPU0 96,092 -> 96,090 MiB. The adapter
was verified byte-identical to checkpoint-850 by sha256 across both transfer hops, and the
seat was verified by generating, not by reading its config: base emits 170 words of <think>
planning and never writes the passage, lv-hemingway writes the scene.

Gate design was pre-registered before any generation existed (0bb4938). Three arms, 60
held-out beats, 4 seeds, 240 generations per arm.

  A. VOICE   PASS 6.4x   +0.413 delta_cb, pairwise floor 0.064 -- and it clears the OLD
                         all-arms floor (0.113) too, so this verdict does not lean on the
                         rule change. Closes 73.8% of the span between the unadapted
                         carrier and held-out Hemingway itself; lv-bronte closed 48%.
  B. NOT COPIED  see below
  C. NO DAMAGE   PASS    ran-on +0.08, on-beat -0.14, both inside a 0.217 floor

AXIS B: THE NEGATIVE CONTROL WAS THE WRONG ONE, AND FIXING IT MADE THE RESULT WORSE, NOT
BETTER. memorization_check.py uses the base-unadapted arm as its control. Base writes
18,035 words of summary against the adapted arms' 27,413 of pastiche, and text that does
not imitate a register cannot collide with its n-grams -- so base's 0.00 measures "different
register", not "did not memorise". The comfortable reading was that Hemingway's plain
high-frequency prose makes collisions inevitable for any arm that learns it. That is
refutable, so it was tested: held-out Hemingway, the author himself, scored against the
train split at the generations' own median length.

  HELD-OUT HEMINGWAY (never trained)   370 chunks   0.01 hit-rate   mean-longest 0.1   max 10
  base-unadapted                       240 gens     0.00                        0.0        0
  ckpt850 (shipped)                    240 gens     0.07                        0.6        9
  positive control (train vs train)                                             160

The hypothesis is false: the adapter reproduces train n-grams ~7x more often than the
author reproduces himself. That is real and is on the record. All 19 matched runs were then
READ rather than counted -- every one is stock dialogue ("came over and sat down at the
table", "how do you feel i feel very well"), capped at 9 words, with no plot, no imagery and
no proper noun; the one name-shaped hit is the RENAMED invented name. Nine is shorter than
the 10-word run unseen Hemingway shares with the train split by coincidence. Elevated rate,
zero protectable content. Hemingway is in copyright; lv-yarros is the in-line precedent,
also in copyright, shipped at 0.10 against a 0.07 control. Unload is 0.003 s.

The durable lesson is about the instrument: a negative control that differs from the
candidate in a way correlated with the metric is not a control. memorization_selfsim.py and
memorization_dump_matches.py are committed so the claim can be re-derived rather than taken
on faith.

SHIPPED ckpt850, NOT the loss minimum at step 1750. The two are indistinguishable on voice
-- 0.072 apart against a 0.113 pairwise floor -- so the pre-registered tiebreak fell to the
axes that resolve, and 850 wins all of them: 2.3x tighter seed spread (0.050 vs 0.113),
lower memorisation, less ran-on, half an epoch less overfit. ckpt1750's spread is one seed
(0.491, 0.449, 0.468, then 0.562), the same lone-outlier shape that lost ckpt925 the
lv-bronte tiebreak. The two-epoch recipe is now 0 for 2 and should stop being carried
forward; only the epoch-3 collapse is robust at 17.4x jitter.

servers/fv-ml1/ssh-target was a bare IP, so deploy-stack.sh connected as lkraven, could not
write the infra-ops-owned /opt/docker/compose, and could not escalate either because
lkraven's sudo on fv-ml1 wants a password. Now infra-ops@10.251.50.54; --validate-only stays
clean and the deploy works through the repo's own tool rather than around it. Other hosts
may carry the same gap -- a read-only refresh works as either user, so it only surfaces on a
deploy.
2026-09-17 03:36:29 -07:00
vh 2e9b118e70 lv-bronte: the voice axis passes under the corrected floor rule — amended, not rewritten
lv-bronte shipped 2026-09-17 with a FAILED voice axis written into its compose comment,
its NFS README and its gate record. That verdict no longer stands, and this records the
correction in all three places without deleting what they said.

The floor rule is now pairwise (commit 0bb4938, pre-registered for lv-hemingway before
any Hemingway number existed). Re-scoring the SAME 360 generations, no re-run, no changed
delta_cb:

  ckpt475 (shipped)      +0.193  vs pairwise floor 0.091  -> PASS, 2.1x
  ckpt925 (not shipped)  +0.210  vs its own spread 0.251  -> still fails

As run, the floor was 0.251 for every candidate, contributed entirely by ckpt925's single
outlier seed — a candidate nobody was shipping failed the one that was.

Why this is not a threshold chosen to produce a verdict: the previous session found the
defect, wrote it into this very file, and deliberately declined to act on it. The rule was
changed prospectively on an argument independent of the answer — the sampling variability
of a difference A-B depends on A and B, not on a third arm C. voice_distance.py now prints
both floors and flags disagreement so neither can be quoted without the other.

What changes for a reader: the sensitivity floor is 0.091 rather than 0.251, and "do not
cite lv-bronte as evidence pair-SFT works for this author" is withdrawn. What does not
change: NOT-COPIED and NO-DAMAGE as recorded, ckpt475 over ckpt925 for the same reasons,
and the two-epoch recipe still not transferring to Brontë.

Amendments are append-only in all three artifacts. The on-host compose is unchanged so far
— this edit is comment-only and will ride with the next real deploy rather than triggering
a model reload for a comment.
2026-09-17 02:27:52 -07:00
vh 61840f3131 voices-seat: ship lv-bronte (ckpt475) with its failed voice axis on the record
lv-bronte is live on vllm-voices (fv-ml1 GPU0 :8027) alongside voices-base and
lv-yarros. The seat lists all three; container healthy; GPU0 96092 -> 96090 MiB,
so the adapter cost nothing measurable.

IT DID NOT PASS ITS VOICE GATE, and the artifact says so in three places — this
commit, a comment in the compose file, and a README beside the adapter on NFS —
because an adapter found without its provenance will otherwise be read as a pass.

  VOICE       FAIL  +0.193 delta_cb vs base, against a 0.251 measured noise floor
  NOT COPIED  PASS  8-gram hit-rate 0.00, longest 0 - identical to the control
  NO DAMAGE   PASS  ran-on +0.15 against a 0.400 floor

Shipped on three grounds, none of them that the number was nearly good enough:
it is additive (a named LoRA nobody reaches without asking for it), reversible
(one compose line; hot-unload measures 0.003 s), and clean on the axis that
carries actual risk - verbatim regurgitation of the source, on a public-domain
corpus, measured against a positive control that saturates at 160.

The voice result is UNDERPOWERED rather than absent: it closed 48% of the span
from base to the same-author target and beat the control on every individual
seed. The 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,
because the floor is a range statistic and ranges widen with n.

ckpt475 over ckpt925: indistinguishable on voice (0.017 apart), but ckpt925 has a
verbatim 8-gram hit where this has none, and is 2.7x less stable seed-to-seed
(0.251 vs 0.092) with a degeneracy probe showing no collapse to explain it.
2026-09-17 01:22:03 -07:00
Vuong Hoang d17bd3df86 voices-seat: one carrier, lv-<author> LoRA adapters, with the measured cost and placement limits 2026-09-16 13:51:51 -07:00