Causal Object-File Compiler: Evidence Review

Status: external COFC proposal reviewed against the live ER-TT grammar, all closed canaries, the completed scale audit, and the locally prepared factorized witness-route preregistration. No new neural run is authorized by this review.

Reviewed source: FRONTIER_AGENT_PLANS.md

Workspace SHA-256: 8903788809f987372ba23d1cff77e8e86641a174e9cc8b02828c740ab2a63271

The reviewed plan contains 433 lines, 2,550 words, and 18,451 bytes. It is an evidence-aligned rewrite of the external proposal, not a verbatim copy.

1. Executive Verdict

COFC is the strongest long-range architecture proposed so far because it separates two variables that the failures show must not be collapsed:

• a unique token for each physical occurrence; and
• a nominal equivalence class for what that occurrence denotes.

Its second important move is joint decoding of a coherent witness parse rather than independent pointer decisions. That directly targets marginal-route v1.1's 806 one-occurrence failures.

The supplied plan was not ready to run verbatim. It contained one stale stage, one interface mismatch, and two large attribution risks. The revised decision is:

RETAIN_COFC_AS_LEADING_SUCCESSOR; RUN_CURRENT_FACTORIZED_FALSIFIER_FIRST; REQUIRE_CPU_NONTRIVIALITY_AND_MATCHED_CONTROLS_BEFORE_NEURAL_COFC.

2. What The New Evidence Changes

2.1 The addressed experiment is already closed

The proposal's Stage A says to run the ordinal/count addressed canary. Job 694928 has already done so and is rejected:

• witness rows: 59.500%;
• packet/joint/relation: 60.9125%;
• state: 80.1375%;
• answer: 90.225%; and
• minimum-cardinality joint: 43.606%.

It cannot be presented as a pending experiment.

2.2 The scale audit rejects a simple magnitude diagnosis

The no-optimizer audit is also complete. Zero ordinal yields 0% witness rows; zero count yields 0.4875%; scale 1.5 improves witness rows to 70.425% but remains far below the 89.925% marginal parent and degrades events to 94.9625%.

This is stronger than the previous "ordinal norm became too large" story. Address variables contain useful information, but the rejected model needs both and entangles them with shared query/key geometry. A separately routed scalar address bus remains scientifically distinct; post-hoc rescaling does not.

2.3 The immediate factorized test is already concrete

R12_ER_FACTORIZED_WITNESS_ROUTE_PREREG.md defines a witness-only 14 x 12 x 14 residual table plus twelve bounded, zero-initialized role gates, for 2,364 parameters. Centering and bounded output prevent an unbounded cardinality shift; zero gates preserve the v1.1 logits exactly at initialization. The route cannot read identity bytes or outcomes.

This is cheaper and more attributable than jumping immediately to a 2--3M parameter COFC. The updated score path includes same-seed, same-parameter baseline, structural-only, and shuffled-address arms, with a frozen +0.5-point treatment advantage requirement. A pass would show that the current grammar needs a source-local count/role/ordinal coordinate. It would not validate object files or joint inference; a high structural-only score would instead identify finite syntax routing.

Exact source commit 4643d1a51defe53397f9bed481051621d85c0b11 is now frozen and pushed before any post-commit seed. No H100 job or new probe score exists.

3. Strongest Parts Of COFC

3.1 Occurrence and identity are correctly separated

ER-TT deliberately allows the after-witness list to repeat the same nominal symbol. The correct representation therefore requires:

physical occurrence A != physical occurrence B
nominal identity(A) may equal nominal identity(B)

This cleanly explains why a wrong duplicate occurrence remains a pointer error even when the equality-derived relation is semantically close or identical.

The interdisciplinary references support the abstraction, not the result. Kahneman, Treisman, and Gibbs describe object files as temporary episodic representations linking successive states of one object (PubMed). Green, Karvounarakis, and Tannen explicitly tag input tuples so provenance survives relational operations (PODS paper). The June 2026 Dual-State Slot Attention preprint reports slot swapping when appearance and identity share one state and improves its video task by separating them (arXiv). None of these papers demonstrates that COFC will solve ER-TT.

3.2 Joint paths match the observed error geometry

Every marginal-route failure has exactly one wrong occurrence, commonly a neighbor that locally outranks the correct late after-witness. A complete path can recover a locally second-ranked candidate when the aggregate path is best. This is the useful computational import from global sequence alignment (Needleman-Wunsch).

3.3 The executor remains untouched

COFC correctly leaves the source-deleted relation motor alone. That respects the strongest causal fact in the project: valid packets execute exactly, so compiler work should not be disguised as more recurrence.

3.4 The proposal exposes good interventions

Address swaps, nominal-signature swaps, joint-decoder ablation, object-ID permutation, source poison, and directory shuffle manipulate distinct causal objects. These are much more diagnostic than another undifferentiated capacity increase.

4. Corrections Required Before Implementation

4.1 Current ER-TT monotonicity is almost deterministic

The renderer emits each active rule as an opcode, exactly N before symbols, a separator, and exactly N after symbols. There are no opaque distractors inside a witness segment. Once a system finds the boundary and cardinality, the legal monotone path is effectively the ordered list itself.

That makes monotone alignment legal, but weakens its scientific value on the current board. A success could be fixed-grammar parsing rather than resolution of ambiguous associations. The CPU falsifier must measure the number of legal paths and introduce a separately preregistered distractor grammar before COFC can test its claimed mechanism.

4.2 One-to-one is local to occurrence positions

Candidate non-reuse is valid within one ordered before or after path because physical source positions are distinct. It is invalid as a global relation constraint. ER-TT relations are intentionally total and non-bijective, and self-maps are legal.

Thus:

• separate monotone paths per segment are admissible;
• repeated nominal classes across selected after occurrences are admissible;
• global Sinkhorn/Hungarian relation assignment remains forbidden; and
• factors may never force nominal bijectivity.

4.3 The proposed query directory does not match this board

The external text assumes that the late query contains a symbol referent whose signature can be matched against an object directory. Current ER-TT queries are position numerals: Q1...Q6 or ASK 1...6. Both recent canaries already score query routing at 8,000/8,000.

An object directory is a good future test for referential or alias-bearing queries, but it is irrelevant to the current witness residual. Adding it now would change an interface that is already exact and confound attribution.

4.4 Factor messages can become host repair

Monotonicity, segment membership, cardinality agreement, and equality between model-selected source objects are legitimate source-local factors. Graph validity, executor consistency, final answers, retries, or target relations are not. The factor schedule must be fixed; invalid outputs stay wrong.

The factor-graph literature shows how global functions can be decomposed into local factors and processed by message passing (primary paper). It does not determine which Shohin factors are scientifically permissible.

4.5 Cardinality extrapolation is a separate experiment

Training on N=3...6 and immediately scoring N=7...9 simultaneously changes tensor shape, grammar length, candidate count, query vocabulary, state size, and evaluator limits. That is a valuable eventual test, but not the first COFC board. First establish fresh in-range renderer/occurrence transfer; then freeze a separate extrapolation board.

4.6 The parameter estimate is provisional

The proposal's 2--3M estimate is plausible under the 14.47M remaining headroom, but no implementation or optimizer-state audit exists. Dynamic programming, factor rounds, temporary state, object-directory bytes, and sequential compute must be reported even when they add no parameters.

5. Disposition Of Proposed Components

6. Best Experimental Sequence

1. Freeze and run the existing 2,364-parameter factorized train-only canary.
2. Build a CPU COFC legality/nontriviality suite before any neural COFC source.
3. Quantify whether the current grammar has multiple legal paths; if not, add a new distractor grammar rather than claiming joint inference on a deterministic parse.
4. Compare independent marginals, the factorized table, joint COFC, independent COFC with identical unary logits, fused-ledger COFC, and structural-only/ shuffled controls in one matched train-only experiment.
5. If the matched mechanism gates pass, generate a fresh N=3...6 board with unseen renderers, distractors, object-ID permutations, and non-bijective rules.
6. Only then freeze a distinct N=7...9 extrapolation and referential-query program.

7. What Different Outcomes Would Mean

• Factorized table passes: current ER-TT needed a local structural coordinate; do not call that general object-file compilation.
• Factorized table fails, joint COFC passes: independent role decisions were the causal bottleneck.
• Joint COFC helps only with distractors: current board was too deterministic to identify the mechanism, but the expanded board supports it.
• Joint alignment passes while unseen renderers fail: unary landmark or segment discovery remains the bottleneck.
• Compilation passes while a future referential query fails: the retained nominal directory or query matcher is inadequate.
• Only grammar-heavy factors pass: the result is bounded parser engineering; the next experiment must weaken or vary the grammar.
• Source-retained control wins after source-deleted COFC fails: the compiled object state omits query-relevant information.

8. Final Decision

The smart model found a genuinely better conceptual architecture. “Surrogate keys plus coherent joint parsing” is a more faithful response to the evidence than adding richer positional vectors to independent bilinear heads.

The evidence-aligned version is narrower than the submitted text:

• the addressed canary and scale audit are finished, not pending;
• the 2,364-parameter residual route remains the immediate falsifier;
• monotone alignment must first be shown nontrivial;
• one-to-one constraints stop at physical positions inside a segment;
• current positional queries remain unchanged; and
• cardinality extrapolation and referential object directories receive their own later boards.

With those corrections, COFC is the leading successor architecture if the factorized lookup cannot close the witness gate—or the leading harder-board test if that lookup succeeds too easily.