Pre-reg — full opt-in stack read (pricing the combined promotion)

2026-08-14, drafted 11:0xZ, posted in-channel before the read. Queue item sim-full-optin-stack-read. The owner has three appearance promotions pending, each measured SEPARATELY: clutter real-crop patches 0.713→0.556 (fg-fix read, pre-reg’d in-channel 05:23Z 08-13), arm photometrics 0.713→0.698, and mount material (alone n.s.; rides the material stack to 0.702). If the flags flip together, the interactions are unmeasured — this read measures the full stack in one paired harness.

Plain words. We have three separate fixes that each make the simulated top-camera view look more like the real robot’s footage: pasting photos of the real desk clutter over the rendered stand-ins (the big win), fixing the arm’s surface colors and shine, and fixing the white camera bracket’s color. Each was measured on its own. But the plan is to turn them all on together, and improvements don’t always add up — one fix can hide or undo another. This read renders 100 paired scenes with everything off vs everything on and asks the policy’s own frozen vision encoder whether the combination is at least as good as the best single fix, and whether the pieces still add.

Question

Does the full opt-in stack (clutter patches + arm_photometrics='v1'

• mount_material='v1') read at least as real as the best single fix — i.e. do the material fixes still contribute on top of the clutter patches, or do the promotions interact?

Design

fontaine/scripts/sim_full_optin_stack_read.py: TWO production v3 instances (numpy post backend) over the same 20 seeds × 5 appearance draws — default materials vs the two-flag material stack — both hooked at _composite with the noise RNG state restored per arm (the fg-fix harness, verbatim). Arms embedded:

• v3 — baseline production output (bit-exact by construction);
• patched — baseline materials, no_clutter mask + the mined real crops pasted at the drawn poses: the in-run replication of the banked best single (0.5561);
• stack_full — THE ARM: graded materials + no_clutter mask + the pasted crops. The exact frame the combined promotion would make the production default.

Encoder probe: er_60k trunk, knn5 vs held-out real-B, the established protocol. In-run oracles: per-slot qpos bit-equality across instances (the grades consume no RNG); clutter draws + episode affine bit-equal across instances; changed-px fraction between the two production frames ≤ 30% (an RNG-stream divergence flips ~100% of pixels through the sensor noise; the material grades touch only arm/servo/mount pixels).

Registered anchors / aborts

ABORT (no claims) unless BOTH: in-run v3 knn5 AUROC in 0.713 ± 0.005 (the established 20×5 gate) AND in-run patched AUROC in 0.5561 ± 0.010 (the banked fg-fix best single must replicate — it anchors the “beats best single” comparison).

Decision rule (frozen before the read)

• PRIMARY PASS (as queued): paired Δknn5 CI95 (10k resamples, rng 0) of stack_full vs v3 entirely below 0 AND stack_full AUROC ≤ 0.5511 (banked best single 0.5561 − ε, ε = 0.005 registered) → the combined promotion is priced: the stack beats every single fix, materials still pay on top of clutter.
• CI below 0 but stack > 0.5511 → the stack helps vs v3 but the materials’ contribution is absorbed/interacted away next to the clutter patches — the promotion case reduces to clutter-only first; flagged on the asks.
• CI straddles or above 0 → interaction pathology (the stack reads LESS real than default despite three individually-good parts) — inspect the dumped frames before any claim; promotions flagged.
• Record-only riders: additivity — measured stack AUROC vs the additive prediction v3_inrun − 0.1566 − 0.0103 (banked clutter Δ
  • banked material-stack Δ; ≈ 0.546 at a centered anchor), the deviation is the interaction term; paired stack_full vs patched (the materials’ marginal contribution ON TOP of clutter — the banked material-stack rider CI [−2.45, −0.57]e-07 is the no-interaction reference); clean anchor.

Scope notes

• No promotion has landed (all three flags are opt-in at HEAD; the asks are unanswered) — baseline is the production v3 default, per the queue item’s re-scope clause.
• This is a TOP-camera read. The wrist side of the material stack is already measured (neutral at reset poses, wrist read 06:0xZ); the clutter paste is top-only by construction.

Cost

CPU renders (100 slots × 2 instances + the paste arms) + ~0.02 GPU-h embeds (300 sim + 400 real frames) on the er_60k trunk. R1-B owns gpu0 at ~34 GiB / 80 — the embed job fits in the headroom and does not perturb training (established: the texture-read embeds ran alongside R1-A/B without incident).

RESULTS (10:58Z 08-14, executed same session — MIDDLE BRANCH: stack beats v3, misses the best-single bar by 0.001)

All gates green, exit 0: in-run v3 0.7127 dead-center (band 0.708–0.718); in-run patched 0.5561 — bit-matching the banked fg-fix read (deterministic renders, the two harnesses agree exactly, same cross-check shape as the wrist read’s top rider); qpos

• clutter draws + episode affine bit-equal across both instances × 100 slots; changed-px tripwire quiet (max 12.3% of frame — the material grades’ arm/servo/mount footprint, nowhere near the ~100% RNG-divergence signature).

• PRIMARY — NOT PASSED, by the ε margin. Paired Δknn5 of stack_full vs v3: −2.075e-06, CI95 [−2.254, −1.891]e-06, 99/100 slots closer — massively below zero; the stack is far better than the current default. But stack_full AUROC landed at 0.5521 vs the registered bar 0.5511 (best single 0.5561 − ε, ε = 0.005): the stack beats the best single fix by only −0.0040, under the registered ε. Per the frozen middle branch: the combined promotion is NOT priced as strictly better than clutter-only — the promotion case reduces to clutter-first, with the materials’ add-on unresolved.
• The materials’ marginal on top of clutter (record-only rider): paired stack_full vs patched −5.50e-08, CI95 [−1.44e-07, +3.37e-08], 56/100 — straddles zero. Against the banked no-interaction reference (materials vs v3 alone: mean −1.49e-07, CI [−2.45, −0.57]e-07): the marginal’s mean is ~⅓ of the solo effect and its CI now includes 0. The material fixes’ small, real solo effect is attenuated ~3× and statistically absorbed once the clutter patches are in.
• Additivity (record-only): additive prediction 0.5458, measured 0.5521 → interaction term +0.0063 AUROC (sub-additive) — roughly two-thirds of the materials’ banked contribution fails to survive composition with the clutter patches.
• Mechanism sketch (not registered, offered for the asks): the clutter patches remove the strongest fake cue; what remains is dominated by the rendered arm geometry/relief signature (the texture programme’s surviving hypothesis), against which the ±few-count photometric grades are second-order. Consistent with the arm-split finding that patched surface 0.556 ≫ real-fg 0.328 — the remaining gap lives in the foreground render itself, not in its albedo.

Disposition. Item closed. For the three pending promotion asks (all still unanswered): the measured facts are (1) clutter patches carry essentially the whole combined gain — promote first or alone; (2) the material flags cost nothing when stacked (no regression; CI straddles zero, point estimate still negative) but their measured solo gain does not survive composition at n=100 — flipping them together with clutter is safe but should not be sold as additive; (3) a bigger-n read could resolve the residual marginal, priced separately if the owner wants the material flags’ stacked value pinned before promoting. No auto-queued follow-up — the decision is promotion-shaped and sits with the owner.

Artifacts: analysis · chart · frame strip