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.
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.
vh