Pre-reg (FINAL) — the wrist-transfer screen: pricing the proxy→behavior link

2026-08-14, drafted 18:5xZ, posted in-channel before any launch. Queue item wrist-transfer-screen-prereg-final. This document freezes the 08-14 design memo into the launchable pre-registration for wrist-transfer-screen-run: its §5–§7 are reproduced verbatim below (§2–§4 here), and the arm list, seeds, honesty anchors, ladder and gate are fixed. From this post on, the run is blocked on exactly ONE thing: the owner’s in-channel GPU release (reserve 12:54:19Z 08-14 stands). Nothing launches before it.

Plain words. We have a meter that says our simulator’s wrist camera looks fake precisely when the robot is manipulating something, and a possible expensive renderer fix. What we don’t have is any evidence the fakeness costs the robot performance. This experiment runs the same policy through the same 100 simulated episodes several times, changing only what the wrist camera feeds it — normal view, blacked out, frozen, arm-appearance corrupted — and measures whether behavior moves, with each corruption also scored on the fakeness meter. The result is a curve: behavior change per unit of wrist-camera honesty. Flat curve → the wrist gap is a tolerated artifact and the renderer fix loses its main justification. Steep curve → the fix finally has a price in the currency that matters. The design was posted earlier today as a memo; this page is the formal commitment — arms, seeds, statistics, abort rules, and budget are now frozen, so the results can’t be quietly reshaped after the fact.

§1 Frozen arms, anchors, and substrate

Substrate: the banked sim100 closed-loop harness verbatim (v3 visual stack, v0 physics + sysid’d servos, 30 s / 30-replan episodes, paired design, hold floor and strike gates), per design memo §2.

Arm grid (frozen): two policy rows × wrist-feed columns + one positive control. Every arm: seeds 0–99 frozen (T1: seeds 0–24), deterministic draw-0, identical physics, identical top-view path — only the wrist frame handed to the policy changes.

• P1 ftrig4k — student + rig fine-tune, euler-1 (banked: +0.08 cm mean progress, 47/100 engaged).
• P2 simft — the sim-adaptation sanity arm: the same student fine-tuned on sim-rendered replays of real reference-half episodes 0–25 paired with the recorded real actions (ftrig4k recipe, dataset swapped). Contamination guards frozen: trains only on episodes 0–25 (the honesty probe’s held-out pool and the 100 pose slots live in episodes 26–49); the honesty instrument uses the frozen er_60k trunk, which never retrains. (Training-data build mechanics live in the run item, not here.)
• Wrist columns: W0 classic v3 render (baseline / in-run determinism anchor) · W1 blackout (zeros; bracket endpoint, never pooled into the appearance-class trend) · W2 frozen reset frame (stage-3 conditional) · W3 arm-appearance corruption (per-tick wrist segmentation of arm+gripper geom ids, strong Gaussian blur inside the arm mask only) · W4 measured-materials stack ON (arm_photometrics='v1' + mount_material='v1'; stage-3 conditional; its honesty delta at manipulation poses is already banked: +3.99e-07 per-slot, CI excluding zero).
• T1 — positive control: top-view blackout, P1 only, seeds 0–24.

Honesty axis (frozen anchors): every wrist transform is also applied to the banked 100 manipulation-pose wrist renders and scored with the established knn5 harness against the manipulation reference — the same axis as the banked anchors 0.877 (manipulation poses) and 0.523 (reset), span 0.877→0.523. The deliverable is Δbehavior vs Δhonesty, not a bag of ablations.

Implementation contract (stage 0, from memo §4): a --wrist-transform {none,blackout,freeze,arm_blur} hook in the rollout drivers, applied to obs.wrist after observe() and before policy packing. Oracles before any run: golden-frame test per transform; a none rollout replays a banked seed bit-identically; a transformed rollout’s qpos trace at tick 0 matches none; W3 mask visual spot-check on 3 banked pose slots. The hook + transform oracles are CPU-preparable under the reserve; the none bit-replay oracle and honesty placement (~0.1 GPU-h class) wait for the release with the rest.

§2 Instrument, seeds, statistics (design memo §5, verbatim)

• Primary: paired per-seed Δprogress (final initial−final cm, the sim100 primary), treatment − W0, per policy row.
• Secondary (all banked sim100 channels): Δbest-point, engagement flip (moved ≥0.5 cm), two-sided-pinch rate, knock-away rate, success ticks (recorded; claims only if the floor lifts, §2).
• Seeds: the banked frozen 0–99, same across every arm — paired comparability is the point, per the standing seed policy (same seed for comparability; fresh seeds are for variance questions this design doesn’t ask). Draw-0 deterministic throughout; no sampling noise in the deltas.
• CI: per-seed paired deltas, bootstrap CI95 over seeds (10k resamples, the established recipe), n=100 per cell (25 for T1). With deterministic policies the CI covers seed-distribution spread only — the per-seed delta itself is exact.
• Curve read: arms ordered by measured honesty coordinate (§3); the headline is the sign and monotonicity of Δbehavior over Δhonesty, W1 reported as the bracket endpoint, never pooled into the appearance-class trend.

(Section references inside the verbatim blocks — §2, §3, §7, §8 — point at the design memo’s numbering.)

§3 Gates and aborts (design memo §6, verbatim — frozen)

ABORT (no claims) unless ALL of:

• W0 determinism: P1×W0 run twice on 10 seeds at stage-1 entry, per-seed final_cm bit-equal — the pairing premise is machine- checked before the screen spends anything. (The banked sim100 ftrig4k rows are NOT the bit-anchor — they predate the fitted lens + v3 wrist; registered config drift. Sanity band instead: P1×W0 mean progress in [−0.3, +0.5] cm and engagement in [25, 70]/100 vs banked +0.08 / 47 — outside it, the visual- config delta changed the policy’s regime and the read pauses for an in-channel note before proceeding.)
• hold floor replicates (|mean progress| ≤ 0.01 cm) and reset strikes = 0, per the sim100 validity gates.
• T1 moves: top-blackout Δ(engagement or |progress|) CI95 excluding zero. Otherwise F-instrument (§7).
• Honesty placement sane: W1 and W3 place less honest than W0 on the 100-slot read (W3−W0 positive, CI excluding zero). A corruption the encoder can’t see isn’t a treatment.
• Cross-arm pairing check: identical spawn_xy per seed across all arms (bit).

Tripwires (recorded, not gated): per-arm latency (the transform must not change replan cadence); W3 mask coverage per tick.

§4 Falsifiers and their decision consequences (design memo §7, verbatim — frozen)

• F-instrument — T1 null: the harness can’t detect any view-fidelity effect at this competence floor. Screen aborts, no transfer-link claim in either direction; the question escalates to the twin tier (§2) where competence is buildable.
• F-null — wrist channel dead: W1 ≈ 0 for both policy rows while T1 moves. This policy class simply doesn’t consume the wrist view in closed loop → 0.877 cannot be costing behavior → tier-2’s north-star payload evaporates (its proxy-unit case survives, but the owner buys it knowing that). P2 is what makes this null meaningful — on P1 alone, “ignores the wrist” and “too sim-OOD to use any of it” are confounded.
• F-flat — wrist consumed, appearance tolerated: W1 moves behavior but W3 (and W4 if run) sit at ≈ 0 despite measured honesty displacement. The dishonesty class is tolerated — same consequence as F-null, stronger form (the policy provably uses the wrist stream and provably doesn’t care how the arm is shaded).
• F-live — the curve has slope: appearance-class treatments move behavior, ordered with honesty. The proxy→behavior link is priced; the tier-2 pilot inherits a behavior-unit payload estimate (slope × the 0.877→0.523 span, direction caveat §8) and gets upgraded accordingly.

§5 Ladder and budget (frozen; measured pace 0.0094 GPU-h/episode)

Worst-case ≈ 12.0 GPU-h; registered gate ≤ 14 GPU-h (headroom so the gate never truncates stage 3 mid-read), expected ~6–9 (stage 3 is conditional). Stage boundaries are hard stops with in-channel posts. (Erratum, corrected in the design memo: its schematic caption said “≤12 gate”; the registered gate is and was ≤14, with 12.0 the worst-case estimate — the memo’s §9 text had it right.)

§6 Launch preconditions and amendment policy

1. The owner’s in-channel GPU release — the only remaining blocker. The reserve (12:54:19Z 08-14) stands until then.
2. Stage-0 oracles green before stage 1 spends anything (§1).
3. Any deviation from this document — arm changes, seed changes, gate re-pricing, budget moves — is a registered amendment: posted in-channel before the affected stage runs, never applied retroactively. Registered limitations (direction asymmetry, the graded-progress floor, sim-only scope, P2’s class-level caveat) are the design memo’s §8 and carry over unchanged.

§7 Status

REGISTERED. wrist-transfer-screen-run is now GPU-release-only: the moment the owner frees the GPU in-channel, stage 0 launches under this document with no further paperwork. Escalation tier if the competence floor holds (0 successes even on P2): the Squint SO-101 twin, whose CPU preflight banked GO mechanically earlier today.