Ran Heretic v1.4.0's 300-trial TPE search on Cold-Fusion. Best trial scores
8/100 refusals at KL 0.0136 against a 98/100 base, versus absolute-heresy at
29/100 and our hand-tuned Robinson L35 at 72/100 / KL 0.0116 — i.e. 64 fewer
refusals for the same damage. Hand-verified coherent: correct arithmetic with
shown working, clean code, 66-167 word prose across nine probes.
Durable findings:
- direction_scope=0 (single shared direction) is decisive on this merged base:
n=129, best 8/100. Per-layer directions n=131 never beat 52/100 despite a
better median. Points against the multi-direction intuition for a diffuse
direction (our two-template |cos| is 0.62 vs Robinson's 0.99 on stock).
- Aggression is not the lever. r(KL, refusals) = -0.561 over 261 trials; the
KL<0.02 band contains both the worst results (median 87/100) and the single
best. A KL 0.3554 trial scored worse than one at 0.0193.
- PR #317 confirmed: Heretic silently drops the MTP head on save. Source 1199
tensors -> export 1184, all 15 mtp.* gone, vision 333/333 intact, exit 0, no
warning. This is also why absolute-heresy ships a byte-identical MTP head —
a bug, not a design choice. Always diff tensor keys after a Heretic export.
- Heretic's recovered direction carries 6.18% of its energy in sink dim 3994,
versus 0.094% for our L35 and 1.97% for the L39 we rejected as brick-inducing.
It survives that only because of magnitude-preserving ablation
(row_normalization=FULL); our plain projection has no such protection, so the
sink screen correctly refused the in-band MTP graft. Same direction, different
operation. MPOA is the prerequisite for in-band MTP on a Heretic trunk.
- Heretic's edit is recoverable from weights: delta is rank-1 (s2/s1 ~ 0.010),
SVD gives the direction, norms give per-layer weights (1.08 -> 1.34, i.e.
over-projection). Cross-layer |cos| agreement 0.9903 independently confirms
the single-direction result.
New tooling in services/coldfusion-abliteration/:
kl_divergence.py first-token KL, class-split, zero noise floor
catatonia_gate.py 12 probes x 220 tokens, prints every completion
heretic_export.py PTY driver; selects by measured value, never by menu
position — Heretic's resume prompt puts "delete the
checkpoint and all results" one arrow-key from the target
graft_mtp.py recovers the trunk direction by SVD; --pristine for the
safe path when the sink screen refuses
Also adds quant playbook 3.13: the NVFP4 recipe sets observer="imatrix_mse" but
llm-compressor has always silently fallen back to uniform MSE for want of
importance data — on this build and on the incumbent. Existing A/B comparisons
stay valid since every build shares the fallback. Parked as id 42.
Guardrail note: this build has lost the self-harm guardrail that the Robinson
L35 build retained. Restoration is the operator's own work item.
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