core/docs/audit/adr-0246-slice0-mismatch-diagnostic-2026-07-17.md

ADR-0246 Slice 0 — Benign Nominal-Frame Mismatch Diagnostic (Evidence Packet)

Date: 2026-07-17 Branch: feat/adr-0246-slice0-diagnostic (fresh worktree off post-D4 main @ 5027adf8) Scope ruling: diagnostic-only. This slice does not retune γ_id, relax the D4 admission surface, enlarge H_id beyond {I}, change identity axes, enable identity_wave_gate, or add any geometric corrector. No serving code was modified. Instruments: ADR-0246 preflight brief §3 primitives — induced action A(F), d_orth, d_stab against the locked singleton stabilizer H_id={I}, per-axis leakage/self-alignment (D4 primitives), and typed residual channels pinned to explicit blade indices (e4=grade-1 index 4, e5=grade-1 index 5). Code: evals/adr_0246_mismatch_diagnostic/ (eval-only; A-04 quarantine intact) · pins: tests/test_adr_0246_mismatch_diagnostic.py (16 green) · raw packet: docs/audit/artifacts/adr-0246-slice0-evidence-packet.json.

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1. Question

D4 Phase 3 measured that real benign final_state.F versors do not preserve the declared value subspace span(e1,e2,e3) (leakage 0.14–0.81, best balanced error 0.346) and hypothesized the root cause as "nominal axes, not dynamically-preserved eigenmodes." This slice tests that hypothesis against the full candidate list:

1. lawful in-span action (rotation/permutation invisible to leakage)?
2. genuine foreign leakage (axes leave the span)?
3. precision / f64↔f32 transport behavior?
4. path accumulation (small per-turn, compounding)?
5. absence of semantic coupling between the declared placeholder frame and live cognition?

2. Method

Four trace classes were decomposed identically:

Class	Source	n
synthetic	brief §6.1 constructions (identity, in-span rotations incl. 90° permutation and π inversion, e14/e24 tilts, e15/e25 boosts, mild drift)	9
adversarial	D4 calibration attack set + π inversion	5
benign	live ChatRuntime wave-path versors over the D4 LIVE_PROBE_SEQUENCE (same probe set as the Phase-3 leakage pin; instance-local recording wrapper, serving untouched)	13
paraphrase	live versors over a paraphrased probe set	12

Per trace: A(F) (3×3 induced action), d_orth = ‖AᵀGA−G‖_F, d_stab = ‖A−I‖_F (G = I₃ exactly for the default pack), per-axis leakage/self-alignment, residual energy typed into null_or_conformal (e4) / boost_like (e5) / spatial_foreign (structurally empty for the default pack) / unclassified (higher-grade or numerical, fail-closed), bivector-plane occupancy of F itself, and an f64→f32→f64 transport delta on A. Suite-level: raw-path composition curve and a semantic-coupling control comparing declared-frame leakage against 3 named alternative frames and 32 seeded random orthonormal 3-frames inside the positive-definite grade-1 block span(e1..e4).

Classifier ground truth: all 9 synthetic constructions land in their intended mechanism class (pinned by tests) — the instrument distinguishes lawful action, in-span-unlawful action, e4-typed tilt, and e5-typed boost before it is pointed at live traffic.

3. Results

3.1 Mechanism classification (the headline)

All 25 live benign/paraphrase turns classify as foreign_leakage. Zero classify as lawful-in-span, zero as in-span-unlawful, zero as numerical.

Candidate mechanism	Verdict	Evidence
Lawful in-span action	No	no live turn has ℓ_rms ≤ 0.02; the mismatch is not a hidden rotation/permutation within the span
Foreign leakage	Yes — the mechanism	every live turn; residual energy is 100% typed onto grade-1 e4/e5 (unclassified ≤ 1e-9 on all 25 turns)
Precision / transport	No	max f64→f32→f64 induced-action delta = 3.6e-5 across every trace — 4+ orders below the observed effect
Path accumulation	No	per-turn d_stab is already 0.15–813.8 (mean 71.9); no lawful chain exists to accumulate. This is not slow drift evading a per-turn threshold
Semantic coupling absent	Yes — confirmed	declared-frame mean leakage 0.572 sits inside the random-control-frame distribution [0.552, 0.655] (mean 0.596); 34% of random frames leak less than the declared frame; frame_e1e2e4 also leaks less (0.537). The dynamics do not prefer the declared frame over arbitrary alternatives

3.2 The foreign leakage has two distinct benign sub-populations

The typed channels + plane occupancy of F resolve structure D4's scalar leakage could not see:

Population A — boost-involved (18/25 turns; the high-leakage cluster). ℓ_rms 0.47–0.81, boost_like (e5) channel 0.17–0.50, F carrying substantial grade-2 energy in the e5-mixing planes (e15/e25/e35, often ≈ 0.5 of grade-2 energy), d_orth from 0.84 up to 6.6×10⁵ — the action is non-isometric, cosh-stretching from boost content — and self-alignment frequently driven negative (to −0.71). Several of these versors also carry O(1) grade-4 energy (up to 11.1) — general even-grade versors, not simple rotors.

Population B — pure e4 tilt (7/25 turns; the moderate cluster). ℓ_rms 0.14–0.33, null_or_conformal (e4) channel fires with boost_like exactly 0, e4-mixing plane occupancy up to 0.98, d_orth small (0.06–0.26 — the action is near-isometric), self-alignment positive (0.80–0.89). These are genuine conformal/null-direction tilts, not stretches.

In both populations the residual is fully accounted for by the typed e4/e5 channels — unclassified ≤ 1e-9 everywhere. The sandwich output stays exactly grade-1; there is no numerical contamination. The mismatch is a lawful property of the dynamics acting in conformal/boost planes, not corruption.

3.3 What this pins down mechanistically

The live cognitive versor's generators live substantially in the spatial↔e4/e5 mixing planes (e14/e24/e34, e15/e25/e35, e45). Any spatial 3-frame — the declared one or a random one — gets tilted toward e4 and stretched along e5 by ordinary benign cognition. That is why:

• leakage is large and broadband on benign traffic (D4's measurement),
• no threshold separates benign from geometric attacks (D4's 0.346 balanced error),
• and the declared frame is statistically unspecial (this slice's control ensemble).

The D4 root-cause hypothesis is confirmed and sharpened: the failure is not that the frame is merely mislabeled within the spatial block (an in-span rotation of labels would show in_span_unlawful with ℓ≈0 — observed zero times); it is that no fixed spatial grade-1 frame is dynamically stabilized at all. Identity preservation as posed by ADR-0244 §2.1 is not a property the current field evolution possesses with respect to any nominal spatial frame.

4. Consequences for ADR-0246 proper (no decisions taken here)

Measurement-driven implications, recorded for the ADR-0246 design — explicitly not acted on in this slice:

1. An induced-identity action must couple to what the dynamics actually stabilize, not to a declared spatial frame. Candidate identity carriers should be sought among structures the evolution preserves (e.g. invariant subspaces/eigenmodes of the observed A(F) family), then given semantic assignment — the reverse of the current nominal-label direction.
2. The e5/boost channel is the dominant benign departure mode and is non-isometric (huge d_orth); any future lawfulness metric that assumes isometric action on a fixed frame will misclassify ordinary cognition. The brief's separation of d_orth from d_stab is validated by live data.
3. Path integrity is not the missing piece for the benign story — per-turn action is already far from I. The §3.4 ledger remains right for its own threat model (slow drift), but it will not explain or fix benign refusal.
4. Precision transport is immaterial at the current scale (3.6e-5 ceiling); the f32 serving cast is not implicated in the mismatch.
5. The typed-channel + plane-occupancy instruments transfer directly into the future IdentityActionRecord (brief §4.1) with zero unaccounted residual on real traffic — the fail-closed unclassified channel is empirically quiet.

5. Verification

• tests/test_adr_0246_mismatch_diagnostic.py — 16 passed (ground-truth classification pins, blade-index pins, A-04 non-import pin, gate-surface untouched pin: identity_wave_gate default off, _WAVE_LEAKAGE_BOUND unchanged at 0.2126624458513829).
• Live capture via instance-local IdentityCheck recording subclass on a fresh empty-vault ChatRuntime(identity_wave_gate=True, no_load_state=True) — measurement-only; the flag remains default-off in RuntimeConfig.
• Raw JSON packet: docs/audit/artifacts/adr-0246-slice0-evidence-packet.json (schema adr_0246_slice0_diagnostic_v1).