World-Alignment.git/RANK_RESULTS.md, branch main

A cheap gate that survives its controls: the anchor bound

2026-08-01T22:15:26+00:00

Three statistics failed the same way -- fields agreeing on the number
and disagreeing on recovery -- because each was invented by staring at
the fields rather than by asking what matching needs. The fourth asks
directly: declare half the scenes anchors, hand over their
correspondence, describe the rest by their field rows against the
anchors, and match one-to-one by Hungarian assignment. Seconds to
compute, and it upper-bounds blind recovery because blind recovery must
also discover the anchor correspondence.

Never violated across six fields spanning the full range of outcomes,
and it separates every case the refuted statistics collapsed:

  synth full        bound 0.989  blind 0.958  gap +0.03
  synth noise 0.35  bound 0.984  blind 0.947  gap +0.04
  synth omit size   bound 0.997  blind 0.056  gap +0.94
  synth rank 8      bound 0.930  blind 0.129  gap +0.80
  Visual Genome     bound 0.291  blind 0.000  gap +0.29

This corrects two claims from earlier today. Caption suppression does
not destroy information -- its bound is 0.997 -- it destroys blind
searchability, by making scenes interchangeable under permutation in a
way given anchors break. And Visual Genome's problem was never spectral
width: with the correspondence handed over, seven scenes in ten still
cannot be identified.

Co-Authored-By: Claude

Correction, same session: the width statistic does not survive its control

2026-08-01T22:02:43+00:00

The replacement gate proposed this morning is refuted by a control run
this afternoon. Independent noise lowers the correlation to 0.828
without narrowing the underlying signal and reaches the same measured
width as a field whose captions omit one factor -- 15.7 against 15.0 --
with recovery at 94.7% and 5.6%. A second instrument built specifically
to fix that, counting canonical directions that generalise to held-out
scenes, fails the same way and rates Visual Genome highest of the three
failing fields.

Established: the correlation does not govern recovery, in both
directions. Corpus overlap does control it -- the caption-suppression
ladder is monotone from 96.4% to 0.0%. Not established: any statistic
that predicts recovery cheaply. Documents corrected accordingly rather
than quietly rephrased; the refuted claim stood for four hours and is
recorded as such.

Co-Authored-By: Claude

Close the backbone row: the prediction held

2026-08-01T21:37:01+00:00

DINOv2-large, twice the depth of base and wider, leaves the shared count
at exactly 15 and moves the correlation by less than the segmentation
noise floor. Four vision-side interventions now raise the vision field's
own rank and leave the intersection alone.

The cheap tier of the register is exhausted. What remains is a corpus
chosen for naturally wide overlap, promoted to the central bet, and the
unbalanced formulation, promoted to the critical path since such a
corpus is unlikely to arrive in bijection.

Co-Authored-By: Claude

Corpus overlap sets the shared width, by intervention

2026-08-01T21:29:37+00:00

Suppressing one factor block from the synthetic captions -- vision still
sees the property, nothing else changes -- costs five shared directions
and the entire result: 96.4% recovery to 5.6%, at a correlation of 0.830
that is higher than anything achieved on photographs.

The synthetic world degraded to Visual Genome's shared width fails
exactly the way Visual Genome fails, at a correlation Visual Genome
never reaches. That closes the chain: how much of the same world the two
corpora describe sets the width, the width sets recovery, and the
correlation reports on neither reliably.

Also records the Delta compute-node offline trap in DELTA_HPC.md, and
marks the superseded verdict in NATURAL_RESULTS.

Co-Authored-By: Claude

Record the gate correction in the concept document

2026-08-01T21:23:26+00:00

The user-facing statement still carried the retired correlation
threshold. Adds the correction, the joint condition that replaces it,
the width diagnosis, and the closure of the shrink-N route.

Co-Authored-By: Claude

Retire the correlation gate: the shared spectrum governs recovery

2026-08-01T21:15:41+00:00

A controlled truncation refutes the project's central go/no-go rule.
Projecting the recovering synthetic fields to rank r holds the field
correlation at 0.902-0.929 while recovery moves 6.2% -> 12.9% -> 95.6%
across ranks 4, 8, 16. A field past the supposed 0.9 threshold recovers
13%, so correlation neither predicts nor forbids recovery and the width
of the shared spectrum is what moves it.

The gate becomes a joint condition on correlation and shared width,
measured by principal angles against a scene-shuffled null. Neither
suffices alone: 18 shared directions at 0.508 fails, 11 at 0.902 fails.

With the old gate retired, natural data was finally searched: 0.0000
against 0.0039 chance. The old verdict was right, its reasoning was not.

Also closes route D by measurement. rho_IT ~ sqrt(4 log N / N) rises as N
falls, and at N = 16 through 96 the deepest state a strong searcher
reaches is deeper than the truth in 3/3 replicates at every size.

Free gains: eigenvalue-weighted projection over a wide basis with
128-dim text vectors takes the correlation 0.656 -> 0.716 and shared
width 10 -> 16. Hubness refuted as an inflation hypothesis.

Moving the per-image segmentation eigendecomposition onto the GPU cut
batch time from 130s to 1.9s.

Co-Authored-By: Claude