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.
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.
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.
vh
Vuong Hoang