\begin{table}[t]\centering\small
\caption{Ablations of the sparse editor on the frozen v2 synthetic backbone (dev-iid; random forced budgets; mean $\pm$ SD
over adapter seeds; the reference row is the 5-seed system of Table~\ref{tab:seedmatrix}). ``params'' = trainable adapter
parameters excluding the controller.}
\label{tab:ablations}
\begin{tabular}{lrrrrrr}\toprule
Variant & seeds & params & loss b=1 & loss b=2 & loss b=8 & EM b=2 (\%)\\\midrule
Reference: $M=16$, $L_w=2$, adjacent pairs & 5 & 137,025 & 0.4525 $\pm$ 0.0006 & 0.4491 $\pm$ 0.0008 & 0.4575 $\pm$ 0.0031 & 39.6 $\pm$ 0.3\\
$M = 4$ slots & 3 & 136,257 & 0.4523 $\pm$ 0.0009 & 0.4494 $\pm$ 0.0006 & 0.4566 $\pm$ 0.0018 & 39.6 $\pm$ 0.2\\
$M = 8$ slots & 3 & 136,513 & 0.4518 $\pm$ 0.0002 & 0.4482 $\pm$ 0.0008 & 0.4584 $\pm$ 0.0031 & 40.3 $\pm$ 0.5\\
$M = 32$ slots & 3 & 138,049 & 0.4532 $\pm$ 0.0007 & 0.4498 $\pm$ 0.0009 & 0.4599 $\pm$ 0.0029 & 39.9 $\pm$ 0.2\\
$L_w = 1$ block & 3 & 137,025 & 0.4513 $\pm$ 0.0008 & 0.4482 $\pm$ 0.0011 & 0.4591 $\pm$ 0.0019 & 39.8 $\pm$ 0.4\\
$L_w = 4$ blocks & 3 & 137,025 & 0.4530 $\pm$ 0.0002 & 0.4490 $\pm$ 0.0004 & 0.4563 $\pm$ 0.0013 & 40.2 $\pm$ 0.4\\
offset pairs (i, i+M/2) & 3 & 137,025 & 0.4528 $\pm$ 0.0003 & 0.4496 $\pm$ 0.0004 & 0.4579 $\pm$ 0.0020 & 39.8 $\pm$ 0.5\\
\bottomrule\end{tabular}\end{table}