# 0004 — Return the December study to frozen one-shot robustness

Date: 2026-09-29. Status: **final planning direction requested by the researcher;
implementation, capacity verification, and final-test lock remain pending**.

The researcher requested a final v3 plan based on the assessment of the v3
draft and its fit to the existing architecture. The controlling December
execution design is now [the final v3 plan](../../plan/research-plan.v3.md).
It supersedes the December scope of decision 0003 and the v3 draft while
preserving the v1/v2 protocols, existing implementation, history, and artifacts.
This decision does not relabel v2 as complete, mutate an existing protocol
hash, deploy the tracker, or authorize novel-test access.

The study returns to the final prospectus's one-clean-exemplar-per-unseen-action
question with frozen generic MotionBERT, an identical 8,704-to-2,048 linear
head, physical P=8/K=4 batches, seeds 7/17/29, three required objectives,
class-disjoint clean development selection, and all-100-action final training.
The confirmatory contrast is **full contextual recipe versus standard
contrastive recipe**. Its different margin and regularizer prevent attribution
to contextual neighborhoods alone. SupCon remains descriptive.

The fixed duration is **20 epochs**, including three complete engineering
pilots. There is no performance-dependent horizon or best-epoch selection.
Each arm receives the same three learning rates and three paired seeds,
followed by nine fresh final heads. The optional regularizer-only control is
omitted now for bounded December scope and capacity, before new pilot/selection
scores. No post-opening extension is permitted.

Retain the validated development episode and official novel anchors. Adopt
nested corruption severities and a fixed auxiliary-training torso fallback.
Use a conditional within-action performance-cluster bootstrap with seeds,
actions, anchors and realized corruptions held fixed. Report absolute
corrupted scores, every seed, every cell and leave-one-action-out sensitivity.
A null or negative contextual result is a successful scientific outcome.

Build on the clean committed v2/Week 3 successor architecture while preserving
the dirty local checkout. Version the retained frozen pipeline for v3; keep
v2 benchmark internals and historical settings. Produce fresh v3-bound caches
after extraction/validation code is frozen. All training/extraction versions
must respect the same dataset-level opening state.

The historical aggregate loader deserializes all records before selecting
auxiliary examples. Existing seal evidence means no novel retrieval
preprocessing, embedding, visualization, scoring, or tuning access; it does
not establish that novel bytes were never deserialized. Audit this fact and
every historical opening location before pilots. The new final extractor must
validate the full v3 lock and atomically record opening before loading novel
annotations. Any prior outcome access blocks the planned confirmatory opening.

September 29 SCC inspection found 272.80 decimal GB free, leaving about
58.05 GB above the **200 GiB** reserve. The final plan budgets **100 decimal GB
incrementally**, including slack and the existing architecture's separate
primary/official artifacts; current capacity is short by approximately
**41.95 GB**. Additional accessible artifact capacity is a concrete prerequisite.
Previous clean extraction success is not full-campaign feasibility. The October
18 gate requires measured complete
pilots and corrupted development extraction/scoring, a GPU allocation calendar,
actual researcher availability, and the entire workload/storage forecast with
at least 25% slack. Failure requires a documented result-blind amendment before
selection; do not shrink one arm or change the test after seeing outcomes.

Independent-research governance remains effective; no advisor sign-off is
required. Retain source/licensing safeguards and the recorded BU determination.
Adopt the matching machine-readable v3 configuration, `AGENTS.md`, public
fallback, and guarded tracker migration during implementation. Preserve live
versions, evidence, private ownership/RLS, closed-week audit rules, and actual
time records. This planning decision records no invented hours or completed
operational gates.
