results: close Oral-A v3 causal-capture gate

1 files changed, 26 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/ORAL_A_V3.md b/ORAL_A_V3.md
index b668ea0..2ffc19d 100644
--- a/ORAL_A_V3.md
+++ b/ORAL_A_V3.md
@@ -84,3 +84,29 @@ Pareto point.
 V3-0/V3-1 cannot raise the strict ICLR score. A complete V3-2 pass moves the
 forecast from 5 to 6; oral-level scale requires V3-3.
 
+## Audited outcome (2026-07-22)
+
+All four V3-1 records were finite and shared clean source commit `612196a`.
+The frozen selector chose `eta_A=0.01`. The matched alignment endpoints were:
+
+| estimator | early-third alignment | all-layer alignment |
+|:--|--:|--:|
+| V2 channel subspace | 0.007209 | 0.052740 |
+| V3 vectorizer subspace | 0.007139 | 0.062579 |
+
+V3 improves the all-layer mean by `0.009839`, mostly through middle and late
+blocks, but does not improve the binding early-layer endpoint. It fails the
+`0.01` absolute early threshold, the `+0.01` matched improvement, and the 60%
+family-oracle threshold; only the all-layer check passes. Rates `0.1` and `1.0`
+reduce early alignment further to `0.004804` and `0.002234`.
+
+The calibration MSE/power values are not compared across V2 and V3 because
+their metric spaces differ. The valid common endpoint is exact hidden-gradient
+alignment. V3-1 status is **failed**; V3-2 was not launched, no test endpoint
+or confirmation seed was touched, and the reviewer score remains 5/10.
+
+The negative result rules out coefficient-then-regress variance as the sole
+early-layer bottleneck. Direct matrix estimation works exactly and lowers
+matched synthetic variance, yet the real early signal remains unchanged. The
+next mechanism must add informative hierarchical/high-level context or remove
+the remaining cross-layer/parameter-space noise, not repeat this rate grid.