Replay + frozen-parent KD v1 — completed experiment

Source project: private groxaxo/llm-polisher.

Outcome: all three preregistered learning rates failed the public retention floor at the first 8-step evaluation and were rolled back exactly. No candidate was selected. Reserved fact-confirmation and fresh-transfer sets remained sealed and are intentionally absent from this archive.

Parent:

• Qwen3.5-4B BF16 + rank-8 LoRA
• regression: 446/446
• adaptation: 139/240
• proxy: 90/144
• fact DEV: 0/24

Observed pre-rollback regression:

• 2e-5: 346/446
• 1e-5: 429/446
• 3e-5: 386/446

Every proposal restored adapter + AdamW + RNG to the immutable parent. A fresh process then reproduced 55 parent outputs exactly with zero cache substitution.

The full explanation is in REPORT.md. evidence/status.json is the compact machine-readable summary.

Exclusions

This archive deliberately does not contain:

• model weights or LoRA adapter binaries;
• optimizer/RNG checkpoint binaries;
• teacher top-k tensor cache .safetensors;
• credentials, API keys or raw private reviewer reasoning;
• the sealed 48-question fact confirmation payload;
• the sealed 144-case fresh-transfer payload.

This is a failed-strategy research record with passing implementation/audit checks, not a promoted checkpoint.