# `[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]].