Evidence-Aligned Frontier Plan: Causal Object-File Compilation

Status: revised after marginal-route v1.1, the rejected occurrence-addressed canary, its completed read-only scale audit, and external review of the Causal Object-File Compiler (COFC) proposal. This is a research plan, not authorization for a neural run. The existing factorized witness-route preregistration remains the immediate, cheapest train-only falsifier.

Exact factorized-canary source commit 4643d1a51defe53397f9bed481051621d85c0b11 is frozen and pushed. No post-commit seed, H100 job, or new probe read exists yet.

1. Objective

Shohin does not currently need a stronger recurrent executor. S5 and S7 show that learned laws can execute, and the ER-TT motor executes every valid emitted relation packet exactly after source deletion. The unresolved problem is the compiler:

Map renderer-varying language into exact physical occurrence and relation packets when names repeat, cardinality varies, and relations may be many-to-one.

The key distinction is between:

• occurrence identity: this physical mention at this source location;
• nominal identity: the entity or opcode denoted by the mention; and
• causal state: the anonymous state transformed by the compiled relation program.

The current evidence says these objects must interact, but must not be fused into one unconstrained vector.

2. Closed Evidence

2.1 Marginal-route v1.1 localizes the residual

The closed train-only canary reaches:

All 806 witness-failed rows contain exactly one wrong occurrence, usually an adjacent duplicate in a late after-witness role. This is unusually clean evidence for a remaining physical-occurrence routing error rather than a relation-execution or nominal-equality failure.

2.2 Vector-level address/content fusion is rejected

The addressed canary inserted learned candidate-count and occurrence-ordinal embeddings into the query/key memory. It regressed to:

The learned ordinal norm reached 8.64, count norm 2.02, and adjacent ordinal rows 6/7 reached cosine 0.878. Errors expanded from one occurrence to as many as six per row and worsened with cardinality. The architecture is closed.

2.3 The read-only scale audit is complete

Job 694932 inspected the immutable rejected checkpoint without optimization or scored-split access. Its report SHA-256 is d958cc0507fe85a489a3b85368f52ed67cfda6caf9fc5efc8d686216f28f6934.

Increasing ordinal scale improves witness routing but still remains far below the marginal parent and begins to damage events at scale 1.5. Removing either address component collapses the route. The failure is therefore not explained by a simple excessive-ordinal-norm story. Count and ordinal carry useful joint information, but injecting them into shared vectors corrupts other geometry.

The audit is diagnostic only. None of its scales is eligible for selection or promotion.

3. Immediate Experiment: Factorized Witness Address Residual

A local preregistration now defines the smallest distinct test. It leaves the successful v1.1 structural logits numerically unchanged and adds a zero-initialized witness-only table:

bias[candidate_count, semantic_witness_role, candidate_ordinal]

The table has 14 x 12 x 14 = 2,352 learned scalars plus twelve bounded role gates, for 2,364 new parameters. Table values are centered over valid candidates and bounded by tanh; zero-initialized gates make the complete route exactly equal to v1.1 at initialization while preserving first-step gate gradients. It cannot read symbol bytes, relation targets, state, answer, executor output, development, or confirmation. Expected complete system size is 185,534,660 parameters, leaving 14,465,340 below 200M.

This is the right immediate falsifier because it tests whether structural address is sufficient when isolated at the decision logit. It does not by itself establish object files, joint inference, renderer-invariant grounding, or cardinality extrapolation.

If it passes, the narrow conclusion is:

A source-local count/role/ordinal coordinate repairs the current bounded witness grammar without disturbing the nominal equality bus.

The updated score path includes same-seed, same-parameter baseline, structural-only, and shuffled-address arms. Attribution requires treatment witness rows to beat baseline and shuffled address by at least 0.5 percentage points. A high structural-only score restricts the claim to finite syntax routing.

4. Frontier Architecture: Causal Object-File Compiler

The strongest new architectural hypothesis is to make physical occurrences first-class objects rather than features attached to identity vectors.

4.1 Occurrence ledger: which mention?

For each model-detected opaque candidate, allocate an anonymous token o_i and a source-local address:

a_i = (record, segment, left_rank, right_rank, candidate_count,
       boundary_signature)

No raw symbol bytes enter a_i. Two mentions with identical bytes retain different tokens and addresses. Candidate detection must remain model-owned or a frozen architectural transform over public source bytes; gold spans are not available at inference.

The object-file interpretation is well motivated but is not itself evidence of success. Cognitive object files are temporary episodic representations linking successive states of an object, and database provenance tags input tuples so their origins survive later operations. Those are useful design analogies, not proofs about Shohin (object files, provenance semirings).

4.2 Nominal ledger: what identity?

Separately compute the existing exact whole-symbol fingerprint f_i and its nominal class e_i:

o_i != o_j may coexist with e_i == e_j

This is essential for ER-TT. A non-bijective after-witness may contain several distinct physical occurrences of the same nominal entity. Equality must create the relation semantics without erasing provenance.

The June 2026 Dual-State Slot Attention preprint reports an analogous objective conflict when appearance and persistent identity share one slot, but it is recent convergent evidence from video, not validation of COFC (arXiv:2606.12601).

4.3 Causal ledger: what state is transformed?

The compiled initial state and relation tensors continue to use anonymous entity indices. The zero-parameter ER-TT motor remains unchanged:

S_next = R_t @ S_t

After the packet is sealed, source-facing occurrence representations are deleted. Only the compiled packet and explicitly counted retained state may reach execution.

5. Joint Decoding, With A Grammar Firewall

Independent softmax pointers can choose mutually inconsistent local maxima. For an ordered witness segment with candidates c_1...c_M and N roles, COFC instead scores a complete monotone path:

pi = (j_1, ..., j_N),  j_1 < ... < j_N

Score(pi) = sum_k unary(k, j_k)
          + sum_k transition(j_(k-1), j_k)
          + start(j_1) + end(j_N)

Forward-backward can train over legal paths; Viterbi can emit one hard path. This imports the computational idea of globally scoring an alignment rather than committing to unrelated local matches (Needleman-Wunsch).

The constraint applies separately inside the ordered before and after segments. It does not impose a one-to-one relation between nominal entities, rules, or records. Distinct after-occurrence tokens may share one nominal class, preserving arbitrary many-to-one relations and legal self-maps.

5.1 Important current-board limitation

The present ER-TT renderer writes every active rule as:

opcode  before_1 ... before_N  separator  after_1 ... after_N

There are no opaque distractors inside either witness segment. Once the segment boundary and cardinality are known, a monotone path nearly reduces to selecting all N candidates in order. A COFC pass on this board could therefore be a bounded grammar parser, not evidence that joint multi-hypothesis inference solves a general occurrence-binding problem.

Before a neural COFC run, a CPU legality audit must prove both:

1. the decoder preserves every valid non-bijective ER-TT packet; and
2. an expanded source-local grammar with distractors contains cases where independent top-one pointers fail but a uniquely best complete path wins.

5.2 Allowed and forbidden factors

A small factor graph may connect declaration, witness, opcode, event, cardinality, activity, and HALT decisions. Factor graphs are appropriate when a global score decomposes into local functions (Kschischang, Frey, and Loeliger).

Allowed factors must be frozen source-local syntax or type constraints, such as:

• within-segment monotonicity and candidate non-reuse;
• before/after cardinality agreement;
• equality between a model-selected event opcode and compiled rule opcode; and
• agreement between declaration and initial nominal classes.

Forbidden factors include:

• executor state, trajectory, answer, or outcome;
• a gold graph, relation tensor, or target span;
• retry after execution or answer inspection;
• global relation bijectivity; and
• a host validator that repairs an invalid packet.

Use a fixed number of inference rounds. An invalid or noncommitted row remains wrong. Internal proofreading is only an analogy to repeated discriminative stages; it must not become an uncounted external repair loop (Hopfield 1974).

6. Tied Reader And Intrinsic Addressing

For a later cardinality-extrapolation board, replace position-specific query tables with one tied transition:

q_(k+1) = G(q_k, a_(j_k), record_state)

The cell emits the next role or STOP, so learned parameter count does not grow with N. A compositional two-sided position code may replace finite ordinal lookup tables, but it must be tested as a separate intervention. Multi-period grid-cell coding motivates compositional position representations; it does not establish renderer invariance for text (Fiete, Burak, and Brookings).

Do not bundle tied recurrence, intrinsic codes, factor messages, object directories, and new renderer supervision into one first canary.

7. Late Query: Current Board Versus Future Board

The external proposal assumes a late query containing a nominal referent that can be matched against an object directory. Current ER-TT does not have that interface. Its late query is a position numeral (Q1...Q6 or ASK 1...6), and the marginal and addressed canaries already route it exactly on 8,000/8,000 rows.

Therefore:

• do not modify the current ER-TT query path;
• do not credit an object directory for solving the current witness residual;
• on a future referential-query board, retain a counted read-only directory of (object_id, nominal_signature) pairs and test query-by-object-file; and
• include directory shuffle, late-query swap, source deletion, and post-seal poison interventions.

The directory is explicit retained state. Its bytes, compute, and any learned matcher parameters must be counted.

8. Experimental Sequence

Stage 0: finish the factorized residual canary

Use the existing R12_ER_FACTORIZED_WITNESS_ROUTE_PREREG.md contract only after source freeze and seed custody. A pass authorizes a fresh test of that mechanism, not COFC. A failure closes count/role/ordinal residual lookup on the current route.

Stage 1: CPU COFC falsifier

Before training, exhaustively test:

• cardinalities N=2...16;
• duplicate nominal runs of length one through five;
• zero through eight source-local distractors;
• left, right, and bidirectional witness renderings;
• inserted punctuation and variable token widths;
• physical-record permutations and source alpha renaming;
• arbitrary total/non-bijective relations and self-maps; and
• cases where gold is local rank two or three but the complete path is uniquely optimal.

Also quantify how often the current ER-TT grammar admits more than one legal path. If it does not, the current board cannot identify a joint-inference gain.

Stage 2: matched train-only mechanism canary

Only if Stage 1 establishes a nontrivial joint problem, freeze same-run arms:

1. retained marginal route;
2. 2,364-parameter factorized address treatment;
3. COFC joint alignment with separate occurrence/nominal ledgers;
4. COFC with independent decoding but identical unary logits;
5. COFC with occurrence and nominal state fused;
6. COFC without cross-record factors; and
7. structural-only and shuffled-address controls.

Use identical rows, renderer views, updates, optimizer opportunity, source-local targets, and decoder budget. No graph, state, answer, or outcome supervision is allowed.

Stage 3: fresh in-range board

First test N=3...6 on fresh names, renderer compositions, non-bijective rules, self-maps, distractors, and anonymous object-ID permutations. This isolates renderer and occurrence transfer without changing cardinality range.

Stage 4: separate cardinality-extrapolation board

Only after Stage 3 passes should a newly preregistered board train on N=3...6 and score N=7...9. This requires new shape limits, source grammar, evaluator, resource accounting, and gates. Bundling unseen cardinality with the first COFC test would make a failure uninterpretable.

9. Required Interventions

10. Advancement Gates

Exact thresholds belong in a preregistration, not this review. A COFC fresh board should nevertheless require:

• complete witness and relation rows materially above the matched independent decoder, not merely above historical scores;
• packet, state, answer, and joint gates with per-cardinality and per-renderer minima;
• exactly 100% alpha invariance, object-ID permutation equivariance, and record-storage reindex invariance;
• exactly 100% source deletion and post-seal poison invariance;
• every valid emitted packet executing exactly;
• structural-only, shuffled-address, independent-decoder, and fused-ledger controls below treatment;
• invalid/noncommitted packets counted as wrong;
• immutable checkpoint-before-access custody; and
• complete deployed system strictly below 200M parameters.

The external proposal's suggested 97% complete-pointer and 95% joint floors are reasonable design targets, but they are not frozen gates and may not be selected after viewing a result.

11. Resource Boundary

The retained marginal parent has 185,532,296 complete parameters. The current factorized treatment is expected at 185,534,660. The external COFC estimate of 2--3M additional parameters, or roughly 188M total, is plausible but unaudited.

Any implementation must count:

• exact learned parameters and optimizer state;
• dynamic-programming and factor-message FLOPs;
• temporary path/factor memory;
• number of sequential inference rounds;
• paired-renderer target bits, if used; and
• retained object-directory bytes.

No architecture may rely on an uncounted host parser, solver, retry loop, or external memory.

12. Decision

The proposal's strongest contribution is ontological, not biological:

Preserve separate physical-occurrence and nominal-identity objects, then make compiler decisions over coherent complete parses rather than unrelated pointers.

That is the best long-range direction currently available. It directly matches the observed adjacent-duplicate failures and explains why vector-level address fusion was destructive.

The immediate sequence remains disciplined:

1. run the already prepared 2,364-parameter factorized canary under its frozen train-only contract;
2. build the CPU legality/nontriviality falsifier for joint alignment;
3. admit COFC only as a matched distinct mechanism, with segment-local monotonicity and no global bijection;
4. keep the current numeral query path unchanged; and
5. defer N=7...9 and referential object-directory queries to separately identifiable boards.

Success would establish a bounded causal compiler factor. It would not yet establish open-domain grounding, alias resolution, natural-language object permanence, unbounded planning, or general reasoning.