track protocol pre-registrations and interim report in git

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

results-loop/PROTOCOL_UNIFIED.md

@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+# Pre-registered protocol: unified adapter eval (written before any test numbers)
+
+Date: 2026-07-13, after val@499, before step-799 completion. No test-set
+number for the unified adapter exists at time of writing.
+
+1. **Primary loop depth: k=2, for both tasks.** Chosen on val CE with the
+   tie-breaking rule: prefer the SMALLEST k whose hard-cell val CE is within
+   0.01 nats of the best k. (Current val: MBPP hard k2−k4 = 0.004, GSM hard
+   k2−k4 = 0.006 → both ties → k=2.) The full k-curve is secondary/descriptive.
+2. **Checkpoint selection criterion (scalar, fixed now):** mean of the two
+   hard-cell val CEs at k=2, tasks weighted equally:
+   crit = (gsm_hard_k2 + mbpp_hard_k2)/2. Lowest crit among saved checkpoints
+   wins. (At writing: step 499, crit = (0.475+0.205)/2 = 0.340.)
+3. **Primary endpoints:** (a) MBPP test pass@1 hard-bucket at k=2 vs k=0;
+   (b) GSM8K test accuracy hard-bucket at k=2 vs k=0. McNemar, paired by item.
+   Overall accuracy is secondary (known to be underpowered at n=250/256).
+4. **Same-harness rule:** all k, INCLUDING k=0 baselines, measured by the
+   prompt-only fast-path scripts (`generate_frozen_prompt`; k=0 = plain
+   cached generate inside the same function). No numbers carried over from
+   the full-position-loop harness.
+5. **Known missing control (not covered by this run):** a same-size,
+   no-recurrence adapter (h -> h + MLP(h) at the L13->L14 boundary, no loop,
+   no band re-run) trained on identical data/objective. Until it exists,
+   "the loop does the work (vs. 1.6M new weights anywhere doing it)" is NOT
+   established. Queued as the next training run. Note the k=0 column is
+   gated off by construction and is a sanity check only — it is not this
+   control.
+6. **Symmetric interference check (missing):** dedicated GSM8K prompt-only
+   adapter as the reference for "unified costs GSM nothing". Queued. Until
+   then the no-interference claim is one-directional (MBPP side only).
+7. **Band-location ablation (pre-registered 2026-07-13, before any arm ran).**
+   Arms, all else identical (adapter size/init, data, curriculum, k, scripts;
+   MBPP): early L2-12, mid-narrow L17-27, late L24-34 (width-matched, 11
+   layers); shifted L6-22 (width-matched to the original 17). Reference:
+   workspace L14-30 (already run, 3 seeds). Prediction: workspace-centered
+   arms (L14-30, L17-27) exceed early/late on hard-bucket pass@1 at k=2-4 by
+   a wide margin; shifted intermediate. Falsification: near-parity across
+   arms demotes the lens claim from "locates where to loop" to "convenient
+   discovery tool"; to be reported either way. Primary readout: hard-bucket
+   pass@1 at k=4, e400 checkpoints throughout.
+8. **Language commitments for the writeup:** the k0->k1 CE collapse (e.g.
+   4.36->0.18) is format/template learning expected from any trained adapter
+   and must not be quoted as evidence of routing/planning; informative
+   comparisons are within k>=1 cells only. Depth ordering k2 vs k4 deltas
+   (0.001-0.006 nats) are inside checkpoint jitter and must be described as
+   "k>=2 fits hard items equally well; k=1 slightly worse."
+
+9. **Anchor/entrance sweep (pre-registered 2026-07-14 ~03:00, before any arm
+   ran).** Arms: bands (13,30), (12,30), (11,30) — injection point shifted
+   up from L14 at fixed tap L30; plus tap-23 = (14,23). All E2B/MBPP, same
+   recipe, e400, primary readout hard-bucket pass@1 at k=4. Competing
+   predictions: (a) "L14 special" (last full-attention KV-computing layer,
+   lens boundary) → anchor-13 drops; (b) "KV-channel count" (anchors 11-13
+   add 1-3 extra KV-recomputing attention channels) → holds or improves.
+   Body-length confound noted: earlier anchors lengthen the loop body; if
+   results shift, run matched-length control (12,28) before interpreting.

results-loop/REPORT_wave3.md

@@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
+# Interim report: workspace-loop retrofit, through wave 3
+
+2026-07-13/14 · gemma-4-E2B-it (frozen throughout) · DGX Spark
+All eval numbers: held-out test splits, greedy decode, execution/answer-verified.
+Full protocol: `PROTOCOL_UNIFIED.md`; methods: `../WORKSPACE_LOOPING.md`.
+
+## Headline finding
+
+A 1.6M-parameter merge adapter (0.03% of the model) at the L13→L14 boundary,
+trained ~30 min on ~280 self-labeled items, lets the frozen model **loop its
+workspace band (L14–30) over the prompt k times before writing code** —
+converting plan-dependent failures into successes:
+
+**MBPP full test set (500 items), hard bucket (55 plan-only items), k=4:**
+
+| seed | hard pass@1 | overall |
+|---|---|---|
+| baseline (k=0) | 5.5% | 51.8% |
+| seed 0 | **43.6%** | 53.6% |
+| seed 1 | **41.8%** | 53.8% |
+| seed 2 | **30.9%** | 51.8% |
+
+Mean hard-bucket effect ≈ 7× baseline; overall at-or-above baseline for all
+seeds (no net tax). Convergent mechanism evidence: the trained loop is a hard
+fixed-point iteration (cos→1.000 by k≈4), and the J-lens shows latent-concept
+sharpening across iterations (~8× over untrained control on the probe task).
+
+## Attribution: the loop is the ingredient (code), not the weights
+
+Same data, same parameter count, same boundary — only the mechanism varies
+(MBPP 250-item subset, hard bucket):
+
+| arm | hard pass@1 |
+|---|---|
+| baseline | 3.6% |
+| untrained loop (α-merge only) | 17.9% |
+| trained NO-loop adapter (weights control) | 17.9% |
+| trained loop | **42.9–46.4%** |
+
+The trained feedforward control lands exactly on the untrained-loop number:
+~18% is what perturbation + format alignment buys; the remaining ~28 points
+require the recurrence.
+
+## The boundary: math inverts the picture
+
+No recurrent variant beats plain weights on GSM8K. Four-arm grid (hard bucket):
+
+| GSM8K hard | prompt-side only | touches generation |
+|---|---|---|
+| feedforward weights | **11.8%** (best) | 4.7% (pause control) |
+| recurrence | 6.3–8.7% (prompt-loop) | 9.4% (carry, beats FF 2× in-harness) |
+
+Two orthogonal effects: (1) perturbing free-running generation positions is
+costly for either mechanism; (2) recurrence beats weights only where a state
+must evolve (generation side), and loses where it doesn't (static prompt).
+Interpretation: the loop performs **plan refinement**. Code needs a plan
+(loop wins); math needs answer-time computation that one frozen band pass per
+step cannot supply at 2B (CoT tokens remain load-bearing). Overall GSM
+accuracy: no variant beats the 10.5% baseline. (Hard-bucket cells carry an
+outcome-selection caveat — greedy labels; sampled relabeling in progress —
+so the math story rests on the overall numbers.)
+
+## Secondary findings
+
+- **Unified (mixed-task) training regressed both tasks** vs dedicated
+  adapters (MBPP 46.8% vs 52.0% at pre-registered k=2; GSM no better).
+  CE-level parity between arms did NOT predict generation parity.
+- **Gated deployment** (logistic probe on the k=0 workspace state, STaR
+  labels as supervision): 52.0% overall with easy items fully preserved
+  (97.5%); gate recall 64%, precision 19% — the current ceiling; threshold/
+  feature work is CPU-only follow-up.
+- **Frozen-prompt KV-cache equivalence**: looped prompt states are constant
+  across token steps (causality), so loop once + cached generation is
+  bit-identical and ≥3.5× faster. Latent planning is prefill-shaped
+  (parallel, compute-dense) — its economics improve with model scale,
+  unlike serial CoT decode.
+- **Cross-token carry (design C)** is stable and the first recurrent variant
+  to beat its own baseline on math overall (12.9% vs 10.2%), via latent pause
+  positions, but does not beat the weights control; p=6 ≤ p=2 (no
+  latent-depth scaling).
+- **Fixed operational traps** documented in `../LESSONS.md`: plan-pass
+  truncation masquerading as "planning hurts"; stop-string matching the
+  opening fence (pass@1=0 artifact); full-vocab logits OOM (earlyoom silent
+  kills); KV-cache append in layer re-runs; small-pool overfitting ~step 300;
+  val-CE checkpoint selection does not track generation accuracy.
+
+## Status of caveats
+
+Resolved: post-hoc k (pre-registered k=2 before unified test numbers);
+weights-vs-loop attribution (FF arms); seed dependence (3 seeds, wave 5 adds
+2 more); same-harness baselines. In progress tonight: outcome-selection on
+hard buckets (sampled relabeling); equal-FLOPs explicit-planning reference;
+depth generalization beyond trained k; lens battery at N=20; **12B
+replication** (the scale question). Not addressed: second synthesis domain,
+base-model diversity beyond gemma, easy-dip elimination.