# Deviations from the pre-registration (and from the proposal's recipe)

| date | item | what changed | why | status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-29 | Readout initialisation (proposal §3.7: U = 0) | Added a fixed scale s = rms(H) and, after the zero-U bootstrap failed, a non-zero init U ~ N(0, 0.2²) used for all adapters including baselines | Bootstrap degeneracy (FAILURES.md); decided on development data before any test split was read | recorded before test unsealing |
| 2026-10-30 | Controller features | Added the normalised backbone residual and the backbone's predictive entropy (cost charged) | z-only features at chance (D10) | development-stage change |
| 2026-10-30 | Label stream | Added `ctrl_train` (seed 4) for controller labels; `train/calib/dev/test` byte-identical | editor-seen labels unrepresentative (D11) | development-stage change |
| 2026-10-30 | Additional controller variant | Ranking losses (D12) as a separately labelled experiment | mechanistic diagnosis | not part of the pre-registered primary comparison |
| 2026-10-30 | Dense-slot baseline | Seeds run sequentially / fewer seeds if not complete at freeze time (reported with actual n) | ~8× cost per step; node contention | reported |
| 2026-10-30 | Joint fine-tuning reference | One attempt (lr 3e-4) degraded the backbone and was stopped; not re-run | compute priority | not pursued |
| 2026-10-30 | Pre-registration freeze | protocol/preregistration.md v0.1 draft → v1.0 frozen before unsealing (see file header) | — | see file |
| 2026-10-30 | Dense-slot editor at 103M | Not run with the matched recipe (≈ 40 s/step on an M2 Ultra → > 30 h); replaced by a reduced-budget probe (1,500 steps × 8 × 512 tokens at lr 3e-4, i.e. 1/4 of the sparse editor's exposure) reported as a probe only; the first probe at lr 1e-3 collapsed like the sparse editor | compute infeasible in the session | reported, not matched |