Dipankar,
You're right on the first two points. We ran the control — BASE models (no LoRA) through the same bench_binary_k20.py: Hermes-3-BASE, Qwen2.5-BASE, DeepSeek-R1-BASE — all three scored 0/20 TRUE, 0/20 FALSE, 20/20 «other» (natural disclaimers like «I do not have access to...»). So 20/20 FALSE from the fine-tuned models is not a trivial default — it's a real behavioral shift caused by SFT.
But that doesn't close your deeper point: the 10-token cap still prevents any model from reaching the point where a disclaimer would turn into a fabricated number. Whether the problem was «fixed» or merely made «unreachable by design» remains unverified — for both base and fine-tuned. That stays open.
We also found something you didn't call out: DeepSeek-R1-BASE is a reasoning model. Within its 10 tokens, it's still inside its own thought process («Okay, so I'm trying to figure out...») — it never even reaches an answer. The cross-architecture comparison (your point 2) is even less honest than it appeared.
Point 3 (SIPA CLI) we haven't addressed yet — still open.
Full writeup: EXP-024, pushed to governance. Thank you for not letting us lie to ourselves.