PROTOCOL.md

Fail-closed reproduction protocol

1. Lock OpenReview X8evkEdMxb, arXiv 2602.04761, the exact three official base claims, six official anchors, target Space, tags, artifact Bucket, challenge revisions, live absence, PDF, source archive, and every extracted TeX-family file.
2. Treat the absence of an official code repository as requiring an independent implementation from displayed equations.
3. Transcribe Table 1 and Theorems 1–4 as explicit dimension profiles. Compare only shared normalized factors; never invent hidden big-O constants.
4. Check the two-point coordinate estimator by exhaustive coordinate expectation on quadratic functions.
5. Transcribe the one-point hyper-rectangle estimator with componentwise optimism as confirmed by Appendix equation E2. Exhaustively average all coordinate/sign outcomes and compare with the exact linear loss vector.
6. Execute the Appendix practical solver, not the causal shorthand in the main-text pseudocode. Require strict box feasibility, |eta*c_i|<1, and small equation residuals.
7. Execute dynamic two-point meta/base traces without providing path length to the learner. Require finite traces, box feasibility, exact simplex weights, and separated path/variation regimes.
8. Build the universal strong-convexity grid and require factor-two coverage for 4,096 lambda values, plus convex and linear bases.
9. Run destructive controls: remove one-point optimism, replace the barrier perturbation by a fixed radius, erase dynamic path length from the theorem shape, sparsify the curvature grid, and reject a false linear-dimension improvement.
10. Require all science gates, independent tests, exact replay, deterministic poster QA, genuine local Trackio artifact execution, judge-parser ingestion checks, privacy checks, and manifest integrity.
11. Immediately before any remote write, refresh target/tag/verdict absence and obtain a coordinator-assigned rolling slot.

The evidence is CPU-only. GPU/MPS and remote writes are fail-closed.