core/docs/adr/ADR-0262-curriculum-grounded-serving.md

ADR-0262 — Curriculum-grounded serving: exams answered from what was taught

• Status: Accepted — ratified by Joshua Shay via the feat/curriculum-serve-physics merge (0ae54ebb, 2026-07-24). Accepting this ADR does NOT enable curriculum_serving_enabled, which stays False pending ratified curriculum volume (§5.1)
• Date: 2026-07-24
• Arc: generalization Phase 2 (docs/plans/generalization-arc-2026-07-24.md §4)
• Governs: teaching/curriculum_premises.py, chat/curriculum_surface.py, chat/curriculum_serve_license.py, the curriculum_<subject>_<family> bands, the evals/curriculum_serve lane and its independent oracle, and the curriculum_serving_enabled flag.

1. Context

The band cascade (ADR-0256 → 0261) decides arguments whose premises are IN the text. Exams are not shaped like that: the question supplies only the query, and the premises are supposed to be what the student was taught. Until now CORE had no path from "a ratified curriculum exists" to "a question is answered from it" — the 16 domain seed packs and 5 domain-chain corpora were inert.

The generalization plan §4 fixes the epistemology for that path in advance, so that implementing it cannot quietly become "answer from what the model knows". This ADR implements §4.

2. Decision

Add a second serving composer, chat/curriculum_surface.py, behind the default-off curriculum_serving_enabled flag:

1. Closed question grammar — Does <term> <relation> <term>?. One shape. Anything else refuses question_shape_out_of_band rather than guessing which token is the relation. The commit gate is routability, not shape (§5.4): the composer claims a turn only when the question parses AND its terms are vocabulary a served subject teaches.
2. Subject routing by vocabulary — the question goes to the subject whose ratified pack vocabulary contains BOTH terms. No match is untaught_vocabulary; more than one is ambiguous_reading. The subject is never guessed.
3. Premise compilation from the ratified curriculum only (teaching/curriculum_premises.py). A chain is admitted iff review_status == "reviewed" AND both terms are resident in the packs the chain declares. Compilation is scoped to the question's relation family.
4. The same decider — compiled premises plus the question as a "Therefore" conclusion are handed to the verb-predicate band (ADR-0260), falling through to the existential band (ADR-0261), then the ROBDD engine. No subject-specific decision code exists anywhere in this path.
5. Bands = (subject × relation family), e.g. curriculum_physics_causal, gated by the same earned-license machinery as deduction serving through a second ledger reader (chat/curriculum_serve_license.py).

The relation family comes from the CONNECTIVE, not from a chain row's declared operator_family. A question carries a relation word and nothing else; a family derived from anything the question cannot carry would let premise compilation and question routing disagree, and a taught edge could then be missing from the premises compiled to decide it — a wrong answer built out of a correct curriculum. Two corpus rows currently declare a family their connective does not imply; under this rule they are read as their connective says.

3. Why this is sound

1. Gold is a function of (curriculum, question). No case-local hidden text, no world knowledge. A lane case pins the chain ids it draws on and the runner FAILS the case if a pinned chain is absent or unratified — so a curriculum that changes under a case breaks loudly instead of quietly answering from what remains.
2. Open-world reading. A relation the curriculum does not state is UNKNOWN, never "no". Deciding otherwise would manufacture negative knowledge from silence, which is the same failure as manufacturing positive knowledge from silence.
3. No composition. The curriculum teaches force causes acceleration and acceleration causes motion; it does not teach that causation composes, so force causes motion is UNKNOWN. Transitivity of a causal or modal relation is a substantive claim about the world, not a logical truth, and nothing ratified asserts it. The independent oracle reports the shortest path length with its verdict precisely so the lane can assert that a reachable pair is still answered UNKNOWN — composition is provably not happening rather than merely absent.
4. Face-value relations. entropy reveals energy does not license entropy causes energy. Same family, different relation: the reader mints distinct atoms per verb group (ADR-0260), so a family-level near-miss cannot become an entailment.
5. Independent gold. evals/curriculum_serve/oracle.py shares no code with the serving path — its own JSONL loader, ratification predicate, family table, agreement normalization, and verdict rule. It disagreed with the serving path once during authoring, on exactly the point in (4), and the ORACLE was the side that was wrong; that disagreement is why the check exists.
6. Anti-recall is a lane guard, not a hope. A split must carry ≥3 probes whose answer is true in the world and absent from the curriculum, and no probe may carry a committed gold, or the lane refuses to run.

4. License posture

Every curriculum_* band is UNEARNED today, so every answer is served DISCLOSED through the same hedge deduction serving uses. This is not a temporary shortcut around the license — it is the license working. The reason is §5.1.

5. Findings

5.1 The binding constraint on Phase 2 is ratified curriculum VOLUME

Amended 2026-07-25 by ADR-0264 §4.1. The conclusion below — that the remaining work is "a curriculum-authoring and ratification task, not an engineering one" — is wrong, and the reason is in this ADR's own §6. Authoring the ≈219 relations prescribed here takes the family past MAX_PREMISE_SENTENCES at row 17, at which point the band answers nothing. The §6 scope-out is therefore not a future contingency; it is a prerequisite. The criterion stated below (a band whose entailed class is ~1% of its volume demonstrates nothing) is upheld and promoted to a measured precondition. The original text is preserved unchanged.

A band earns SERVE at θ_SERVE=0.99 only with n ≥ 657 committed cases and a genuine outcome mix. The question space of a subject is |vocabulary|² − |vocabulary|, so volume is reachable (physics: 240, philosophy_theology: 22,650). Entailed cases are not: physics teaches 7 causal and 9 modal relations, so at most 16 distinct questions in the whole subject can come back ENTAILED. Sampling cannot fix this — repeating the same 16 questions inflates n without adding information, and a band whose entailed class is 1% of its volume is passed by a pipeline that never entails anything.

Concretely: a balanced band (≈⅓ entailed) needs ≈219 distinct taught relations per subject × family. Physics has 7 and 9. That is a ~25× gap, and it is a curriculum-authoring and ratification task — Shay's call, not an engineering one.

The honest consequence, recorded rather than worked around: the machinery, the lane, the oracle, and the license gate all ship and pass; the licenses do not exist yet; every answer is hedged until they do. The plan's O→S checkpoint ("≥1 subject lane serving wrong=0 with earned licenses") is met on every clause except the last, and the last one cannot be met from present data.

5.2 REFUTED is unreachable from present corpora

Every ratified chain is a positive assertion. Refuting a question needs the curriculum to teach a negative ("no X causes Y") or an exclusion. Until a corpus does, refuted is a verdict this path can render but never reach. The serving code handles it; the lane documents it.

Sharpened 2026-07-25 by ADR-0264 Fact 1. Stronger than "never reach": authoring a negative row without teaching the compiler polarity does not yield UNKNOWN — it yields a confident wrong entailed, because CurriculumChain.sentence is unconditionally affirmative. The independent oracle ignores polarity for the same reason, so gold agrees and wrong=0 stays green. ADR-0264 R1–R4 and R8 close this before any negative is authored.

5.3 The commit gate must be routability, not shape

Shipped first as a shape gate (Does …?) with the deduction composer's fail-closed posture copied verbatim. That was wrong, and flipping the flag would have exposed it: Does the build pass? and Does anyone know the time? would have been taken away from the rest of dispatch and answered with a remark about curriculum gaps.

The asymmetry is the lesson. The deduction composer may commit on shape because a sentence-initial "therefore" IS a signal of intent — text shaped that way is an argument. Does …? is one of the most common ways to open any English question and signals nothing. So the gate became is_curriculum_question: claim the turn only when the question parses to three tokens AND its terms are vocabulary some served subject teaches. Everything past the gate stays fail-closed, including ambiguous_reading (both terms taught, two subjects claim them) and out_of_curriculum (terms taught, relation unknown) — those are real curriculum questions with honest answers. A question whose vocabulary CORE has never been taught is simply not this composer's turn, and the DECIDER still records it as declined/untaught_vocabulary for the lane.

Generalizable rule: a fail-closed composer is only as safe as its commit gate is narrow. Before copying a fail-closed posture, check whether the new gate carries the same evidence of intent as the one it was copied from.

5.4 There is no biology domain-chain corpus

The plan names "physics and biology" as Phase 2's two subjects because "OOD lanes, seed packs, and domain chains already exist". For biology only the first two are true: evals/foundational_biology_ood is a fluency lane (its own contract says it measures grammatical English, not truth) and there is no biology_chains_*.jsonl. The four subjects with ratified chains AND mounted packs are physics, mathematics_logic, systems_software, and philosophy_theology; the composer serves all four. The second subject should be chosen from those, or biology's chain corpus authored first.

6. Scope-outs

• Question shapes beyond Does <term> <relation> <term>? — multi-word terms, "why"/"how" questions, negated questions, and quantified questions all refuse typed. Each is a separate readable unit with its own lane.

• Composition, per §3.3 — a future ADR may license it for a family the curriculum itself declares transitive, but that requires the declaration to be an executable claim rather than a classification label, which today it is not.

• Premise-set scaling — a family with more than MAX_PREMISE_SENTENCES (16) ratified chains compiles to an argument the reader refuses, surfacing as compiled_premises_unreadable. No current family exceeds 9. The fix when one does is to compile the query's k-hop neighborhood rather than the whole family (sound: fewer premises can lose an entailment, never create one), and to disclose the narrowing.

  Superseded 2026-07-25 by ADR-0264 R5. This is no longer a scope-out: §5.1's own remedy triggers it at row 17. Two corrections to the reasoning above. (i) "No current family exceeds 9" is measured against a corpus that §5.1 asks to grow 24×. (ii) Sound is the wrong property — a sound narrowing can still lose true entailments, which is coverage loss in exactly the class the license counts. The property needed is verdict-identical, which holds for any scope that is a superset of the query-atom rows, because each compiled premise mints one independent propositional atom. Verified over 8,520 questions with zero mismatches — docs/research/curriculum-premise-scope-2026-07-25.md probe 3.

7. Verification

• tests/test_curriculum_serve.py — 20 tests: premise provenance and the loud-failure guard, family scoping never losing a taught edge, taught-edge entailment, untaught composition staying UNKNOWN, untaught fact never REFUTED, relation read at face value, base-form question normalization, anti-recall declines, 3 typed refusals, non-question pass-through, routing, the disclosed-until-earned license posture and the authoritative path when a band IS licensed, and oracle independence including the depth-2 reachability assertion.
• evals/curriculum_serve lane: 32/32, wrong=0, 5 anti-recall probes, both physics bands exercised. Pinned as curriculum_serve_v1.