Augmentation orbits do not substitute for multiple photographs

Four random resized crops per Visual Genome image, segmented
independently with their fields averaged, leave the correlation at
0.6559. Closed-world re-renders resample layout, which is nuisance by
construction, so averaging removes modality-private variation; random
crops perturb framing that self-supervised patch features already
absorb, leaving nothing to cancel.

Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>

3 files changed, 34 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/LAB_NOTES.md b/LAB_NOTES.md
index d8d235f..8c0e9d5 100644
--- a/LAB_NOTES.md
+++ b/LAB_NOTES.md
@@ -549,10 +549,16 @@ statistics (0.19 for DINOv2 crop CLS against Qwen phrase states), so
 in-context features and corpus-specific distributional vectors are the
 better substrate.
 
-Verdict: 0.656 against the 0.9 recovery needs; no recovery run. The
-untried lever is observation orbits, which VG lacks by construction --
-one photograph per scene. Multi-view natural data is the next protocol
-requirement.
+Augmentation orbits were then tried and give nothing: four random resized
+crops per image, segmented independently with fields averaged, move the
+correlation from 0.6559 to 0.6559. Re-renders in the closed world
+resample layout, which is nuisance by construction; random crops perturb
+framing, which self-supervised patch features already absorb, so the
+average has nothing to cancel. Multi-view observation means separate
+photographs, not transformations of one.
+
+Verdict: 0.656 against the 0.9 recovery needs; no recovery run, and the
+orbit lever is unavailable on this corpus.
 
 See `NATURAL_RESULTS.md`.
 
diff --git a/NATURAL_RESULTS.md b/NATURAL_RESULTS.md
index ef7339c..650c77e 100644
--- a/NATURAL_RESULTS.md
+++ b/NATURAL_RESULTS.md
@@ -86,6 +86,22 @@ PPMI vectors fitted to this corpus beat a general language model's
 states, echoing the earlier finding that what the model layer shares is
 the mixed state rather than the isolated encoding.
 
+## Augmentation orbits are not a substitute for multiple photographs
+
+The closed world made two-sided multi-view observation a protocol
+requirement, and Visual Genome carries one photograph per scene, so the
+orbit was synthesised: four random resized crops per image, segmented
+independently, their fields averaged. The correlation moves from 0.6559
+to 0.6559 -- no gain at four views.
+
+The mechanism is visible in what each orbit cancels. Re-renders in the
+closed world resample layout, which is nuisance by construction, so
+averaging over them removes exactly the modality-private variation.
+Random crops perturb framing, and self-supervised patch features are
+already close to invariant under it, so the average has nothing to
+cancel. Multi-view observation, where it matters, means separate
+photographs of the same scene rather than transformations of one.
+
 ## Verdict
 
 The go/no-go statistic stands at 0.656 against the 0.9 that polynomial
diff --git a/artifacts/vg_5k/natural_pipeline_orbit.json b/artifacts/vg_5k/natural_pipeline_orbit.json
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0365ac1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/artifacts/vg_5k/natural_pipeline_orbit.json
@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
+{
+  "protocol": "Continuous states, content projection fitted per modality on scenes outside the evaluated set. Hidden pairs are read only for the correlation.",
+  "samples": 256,
+  "views": 4,
+  "kept_directions": 8,
+  "field_correlation_at_truth": 0.6559307692721238,
+  "recovery_threshold": 0.9
+}
\ No newline at end of file