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What changes for a reader: the sensitivity floor is 0.091 rather than 0.251, and "do not
cite lv-bronte as evidence pair-SFT works for this author" is withdrawn.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.
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