MERNIK — Measure-First Quantization Protocol

MERNIK ("the one who measures") is the evolution of the ASHQ1 battlefield zoo: fewer utility duels, more verdicts. The method (priority-queue allocation) is built; MERNIK is how we prove and certify it.

Think of MERNIK as a finetune of ASHQ1: same base weights (queue, pins, tied groups), retrained objective (measure-first protocol, columns that carry their own ring), and expanded capabilities (slow capability ring, KLD-aware teachers, the zoo bench, and the water-fill allocator).

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0. TL;DR — what the last weeks produced

Gnom v5 + water-fill (2026-10-31): the retrained ranker is measured on a real model — best mean/median KLD on the shelf at both Ling rungs; greedy NETPURE still owns the tail

The 5-fold within-family Gnom (v5, mean OOF +0.527; gnom_kfold_v5_2026-10-31.safetensors) replaced the old production tables on Ling-3.0-tiny. The v5 per-group table (gnom/models/netpred_ling_v5_2026-10-31.json) was used two ways on the same base, imatrix and protocol: the greedy classifier (--utility gnom, top-down because v5 predicts absolute damage) and the water-fill prototype with the same G amplitudes, α=2.4. The v5 artifact was rebuilt mid-flight after a constant-column guard in the fold normaliser (one one-hot type column was constant in a fold's train split; sd=1e-12 blew the held-out z up); the deploy artifact was re-uploaded and its self-test reproduces every stored score to 1e-9.

arm (Ling-3.0-tiny)	MiB	PPL	KLD mean	KLD median	KLD max
stock Q4_K_M	4600	13.327	0.114020	0.048512	14.354789
NETPURE 4500 (old greedy)	4507	13.503	0.095092	0.039573	8.715995
WFGNOMV5 4500	4516	13.0555 ±0.10484	0.070794 ±0.000423	0.028326	9.388152
NETPURE 5100 (old greedy)	5091	13.4271	0.089046	0.037072	9.071382
GNOMV5TD 5100 (new greedy)	5113	13.1311	0.062827	0.024551	10.694695
WFGNOMV5 5100	5116	13.1289 ±0.10602	0.050744 ±0.000328	0.019695	9.858137
stock Q6_K (ceiling, not the same budget)	6198	12.69	0.022102	0.008468	4.612892

Water-fill + v5 is the new fidelity leader at both rungs. At 4500 it beats the old WATERFILL on every column (PPL −0.9%, mean −5.1%, median −8.2%, max −7.1%) and NETPURE-4500 on PPL −3.3% / mean −25.6% / median −28.4%; max KLD is 7.7% above NETPURE (9.39 vs 8.72) but 34.6% below stock Q4. At 5100 it beats the old WATERFILL on mean −19.6% and median −23.8% (PPL +0.5% and max +3.6% are the price) and NETPURE-5100 on mean −43.0%, median −46.9%, PPL −2.2%; max is 8.7% above NETPURE. Against stock Q4_K_M the 5100 arm is mean −55.5%, median −59.4%, PPL −1.5%, max −31.3%, RMS Δp 6.448% vs 9.405%, same-top-p 90.43% vs 85.80%.

The allocation shape explains it. The 5100 water-fill spends Q5_K 3706 / Q4_K 737 / Q6_K 181 / Q8_0 149 / F16 1 MiB — the v5 heavy tail pushes the middle into Q5_K instead of the old plan's Q4/Q6 pair. The 4500 arm spends Q4_K 3230 / Q5_K 788 / Q6_K 101 / Q8_0 55 / F16 1 MiB. The greedy v5 top-down arm (5113 MiB) is not competitive with water-fill on mean/median, only on tail.

Tail, stated plainly: greedy NETPURE still has the lowest max KLD at both rungs (8.72 / 9.07); water-fill buys the mean/median and RMS, and pays the tail. HE was deliberately not run, same doctrine as the 2026-10-27 experiment: the capability column sat on the floor at 4500 (130/164 vs 131/164, duel 0/3 NOISE) and the open question here is fidelity per byte. Operator generation check was positive (informal, not a battery).

Provenance. Builds Ling-3.0-tiny-MERNIK-{4500,5100}-WFGNOMV5.gguf (4516 / 5116 MiB) and Ling-3.0-tiny-MERNIK-5100-GNOMV5TD.gguf (5113 MiB); alloc and result payloads in provenance/waterfill/ (ling_waterfill_v5_a2.4_*, ling*gnomv5_result.json); PPL/KLD logs in /mnt/Vsio/assets/refs/ (*GNOMV5TD*, *WFGNOMV5*). Reference and protocol unchanged: ref_lingq8_wiki.dat, wiki 297×1024, -c 1024 -b 128 --seed 7.

The 5100 experiment (2026-10-27): water-fill beats NETPURE on PPL and mean/median KLD; HE deliberately not run

This was the week the allocator stopped carrying its own architecture table and started reading the model through llama-quantize --dry-run (llama_inspect.py). The same week added the adaptive sub-Q4 floor, recorded 38 greedy baseline allocations across 10 models, and built the water-fill prototype. The 5100 MiB rung is the first measured head-to-head of that prototype against the greedy Gnom build on the same Ling-3.0-tiny base, imatrix and corpus.

arm	MiB	PPL	KLD mean	KLD median	KLD max
stock Q4_K_M	4600	13.327	0.114020	0.048512	14.354789
NETPURE 5100 (greedy Gnom)	5091	13.4271 ±0.10880	0.089046	0.037072	9.071382
WATERFILL 5100 (Gnom amplitude, α=2.4)	5116	13.0611 ±0.10497	0.063126 ±0.000371	0.025847	9.515678
stock Q6_K (ceiling, not the same budget)	6198	12.69	0.022102	0.008468	4.612892

Water-fill buys −2.7% PPL, −29% mean KLD, −30% median KLD at +25 MiB over NETPURE, while max KLD is 4.9% worse (9.52 vs 9.07). It spends the middle — Q5_K 1914 / Q4_K 1519 / Q6_K 1150 / Q8_0 184 / F16 8 MiB — exactly the region the 4500 rung cannot reach. The result is fidelity per byte, not a clean sweep: the tail is the price of the mean.

The same prototype at 4500 MiB also beats NETPURE-4500: PPL 13.1785 vs 13.503, mean KLD 0.074614 vs 0.095092, median 0.030849 vs 0.039573, at +9 MiB. That is −2.4% PPL / −22% mean / −22% median; max KLD is 16% worse (10.11 vs 8.72) but still below stock Q4_K_M's 14.35.

Why HE was not launched. The 4500 battery had already put the capability column on the floor (130/164 vs stock 131/164, duel 0/3 NOISE). A second 164-task battery at 5100 costs ~100 minutes of the single GPU and has a 13-task resolution, so it would produce another draw, not a decision. The 5100 question was fidelity per byte; PPL and KLD answer it. HE stays reserved for builds where capability is the open question — not for every fidelity comparison.

The first MoE build (2026-10-25): Ling NETPURE-4500 wins every KLD column at 93 MiB less weight — mean 0.0951, max 8.72; HE 0/3 NOISE, fidelity win stands (not Q6: stock Q6_K sits at 0.0221 mean / 4.61 max)

The first MoE family is on the shelf: Ling-3.0-tiny-MERNIK-4500-NETPURE.gguf (4,725,910,720 B = 4507 MiB) against the vendor Ling-3.0-tiny-Q4_K_M.gguf (4,823,894,944 B = 4600 MiB), both on the protocol corpus (wiki.test.raw, 297 chunks, Q8-base ref 47.7 GB, base PPL 12.9500, -c 1024 -b 128 --seed 7). The 4500 rung is the comfortable floor: the Q4_K base with the F32 pins is 4454 MiB, so 4000/4200 need the sub-Q4 fallback (automatic when the Q4_K floor does not fit; --dont-allow-q3 refuses it). Stock Q6_K (Ling-3.0-tiny-Q6_K.gguf, 6,499,262,368 B = 6198 MiB) is the fidelity ladder's top rung, same protocol.

metric (wiki vs Q8 ref)	stock Q4_K_M	MERNIK 4500 NETPURE	stock Q6_K	delta (ours vs Q4)
weight	4600 MiB	4507 MiB	6198 MiB	−93 MiB (−2.0%)
PPL (canary)	13.327 (+2.91%)	13.503 (+4.27%)	12.69	+0.176 (+1.3%)
mean KLD	0.114020 ±0.000619	0.095092 ±0.000525	0.022102 ±0.000163	−16.6%
median KLD	0.048512	0.039573	0.008468	−18.4%
max KLD	14.354789	8.715995	4.612892	−39.3%
RMS Δp	9.405 ±0.054%	8.588 ±0.052%	4.347 ±0.038%	−0.82 pp
same top p	85.799 ±0.090%	86.875 ±0.087%	93.647 ±0.063%	+1.08 pp

The absolute numbers are the record. 0.0951 mean is the lowest of any Q4-class build on file (4B NETPURE: 0.1769; 4B stock: 0.1666; 9B arms: 0.1209–0.1262) and 8.72 is the lowest max KLD of any non-Q8 arm (4B NETPURE: 14.17; 9B arms: 25.5–30.0). Only the Q8 references and the near-ceiling 4B 4050-GNOMF16 control (mean 0.0623) sit lower on mean; cross-model absolutes are not a ranking. Within its own control the direction is unambiguous: every KLD column improves, at 93 MiB less weight. The canary disagrees (PPL +1.3%), which is exactly why this project labels PPL a canary and dropped the plain-PPL pass from the teacher entirely — the pre-registered fidelity column is KLD and it does not get overturned by the canary.

Q6_K refutes the "Q5/Q6 level" guess. At 6198 MiB stock Q6_K sits at mean 0.0221 / max 4.61 — 4× closer to base than our 0.0951, and its PPL (12.69) beats stock Q4 (13.33). So the NETPURE-4500 is a Q4-class build, not Q5/Q6; the win is fidelity per byte, not fidelity per quant. The honest claim: the best Q4-class arm on the shelf, at Q4 weight, 93 MiB lighter than the stock Q4 it beats.

Provenance. The allocator is the sighted ranker: the training pool now carries 821 units — 512 dense (Spark X2.6-4B Q4/Q3/Q2) + 309 real Ling units — with 160 tied-group predictions for the MoE (90 structural tensors skipped by the 1D/F32/rank-1 law). The Ling leg is also the first ranker retrain that changes a different model's allocation: on Ornith it retiers 30/442 tensors (rank-corr +0.42 with the dense-only netpred), Q8→Q5 in the middle, layer 0/31 attention up, 1–4 down, same total size — recorded in the Fracture card, not here.

HE closed (2026-10-25, same sampling: temp 1.0, top_k 20, top_p 0.95, min_p 0.05, max_tokens 8192, ctx 16384, --reasoning-effort high, --cache-ram 2048). Stock Q4_K_M: HE 131/164 (79.9%), HE+ 128/164 (78.0%), empties 24. MERNIK NETPURE-4500: HE 130/164 (79.3%), HE+ 124/164 (75.6%), empties 29. Duel scripts/duel.py: 0/3 — NOISE (HE p=1.00, HE+ p=0.60, empties p=0.38). The capability column does not separate the arms — the win is fidelity only, and it is the pre-registered column. This is the instrument's floor (SD ~5.9 tasks, resolution 13) plus saturation above Q4, not the model's ceiling.

3D smoke — my test (2026-10-25): NETPURE writes a working voxel scene first try; Q4_K_M writes broken geometry even on second run

Files (assets/probes/3d/ — also see probe_info.md for full prompt + settings):

• NETPURE.html (22688 B): working scene — Scene, WebGLRenderer, OrbitControls, legend, coherent voxel geometry (screenshot_netpure_20-16-02.png).
• Q4_K_M.html (17518 B): broken geometry — scattered blocks, missing elements, no coherent layout (screenshot_q4_20-15-51.png).
• probe_info.md: full prompt + settings.

The 9B verdict (2026-10-23): a zero-shot Gnom statistically ties the imatrix-trained SMSE — blindness costs nothing. The vendor stock row closed same-day: task-tie at +470 MiB, fidelity collapse (KLD +34% vs the best arm, worst tail, worst canary)

The pre-registered 9B batteries (below) closed on 2026-10-22; the vendor control (plain Q4_K_M, no imatrix, no allocator) closed 2026-10-23 16:17. Duel scripts/duel.py (McNemar exact, α=0.05, same protocol, 164 tasks):

duel	HE	HE+	empties	verdict
NETPURE (Gnom, zero-shot) vs SMSE (imatrix)	137 vs 140 (p=0.66)	129 vs 133 (p=0.48)	14 vs 19 (fewer better, p=0.23)	0/3 — NOISE
stock Q4_K_M (vendor) vs NETPURE	137 vs 137 (p=1.00)	125 vs 129 (p=0.60)	18 vs 14 (p=0.45)	0/3 — NOISE
stock Q4_K_M (vendor) vs SMSE	137 vs 140 (p=0.69)	125 vs 133 (p=0.17)	18 vs 19 (p=1.00)	0/3 — NOISE

arm	bet	HE (runner)	HE+ (evalplus)	empties	PPL wiki	KLD wiki vs Q8 ref	KLD wiki vs BF16 ref	KLD rlmini (interim)
Gnom (netpure) — ranker never saw the 9B, no imatrix	Q8 on the early peaks + Q4 floor	137/164 (83.54%)	129/164 (78.66%)	14	8.7973 ±0.0626	0.12267 ±0.00199	0.12150 ±0.00197	0.2889 ±0.0064
SMSE — imatrix-driven, trained on Ornith's own data	Q5 pyramid through the middle	140/164 (85.37%)	133/164 (81.10%)	19	8.7349 ±0.0619	0.12620 ±0.00206	0.12427 ±0.00203	0.2915 ±0.0065
DEEP (opposite-bet control)	—	—	—	—	8.7760	0.12394	0.12225	0.2972 (worst, as intended)
LAW (hand-law control)	—	not run	not run	—	8.7879 ±0.0625	0.12270	0.12094 (top)	—
stock Q4_K_M (vendor) — no imatrix, no allocator, +470 MiB	frozen llama.cpp pattern (Q6×35, Q8×0)	137/164 (83.54%)	125/164 (76.22%)	18	8.8456 ±0.0626 (worst)	— (ref deleted)	0.16304 ±0.00228 (worst of five)	—

What the tie is worth. The 0/3 columns read "crown must not move" — and the tie has teeth: the learned ranker, blind (zero-shot, no imatrix, never trained on the 9B), holds an even score on both pass columns against an allocator trained on this model's own imatrix. The pre-registered outcome is (c) tie on capability — the next fight is below Q4, where the arms diverge on 117/442 tensors (open).

Decisiveness axis (pre-registered as a separate column): Gnom delivers fewer empties — 14 vs 19 (5-task lead, p=0.23 — a lead, not a result, same discipline as the 4B p=0.035). And the direction reverses the 4B empties law: there, empty count grew monotonically with the depth of the upgrade (blk.27 → 9, blk.7 → 13, blk.0 → 18 empties "protect the earliest blocks and the model becomes more hesitant"). Here the arm that puts bits on the earliest blocks delivers fewer refusals at 97-tensor intervention scale. The 4B empties-monotonic claim does not survive its first big-intervention test — demoted to small-intervention artifact (recorded with both numbers, kept as history).

Fidelity columns — landed (2026-10-23 06:52, both ref legs closed, zero failures). KLD on the protocol corpus (302-chunk wiki.test) measured twice per arm: against a Q8-base ref and a BF16-base ref (the 4B protocol's tier). The ref-tier debate is answered, and boringly: the tier moves every arm by the same small constant (+0.0012…+0.0019, mean +0.0016, 4/4 same sign) and flips no ranking — NETPURE/LAW hold the top-2 on both refs (their ≤0.00056 order swap is deep inside σ), DEEP between, SMSE the furthest from base on BOTH refs. So future batteries rank identically on either tier; the honest "distance to base" number is the BF16 one; the Q8 ref is 4× cheaper to build (22 min vs ~75 min on this box, byte-identical 73.6 GB file format). Deviation note by the protocol law: the 4B batteries measured against a BF16 ref — both tiers are now on file and the offset is measured, not assumed.

The cross-metric tension (noise-level, stated — it is the honest texture of this verdict): SMSE wins the canary (PPL 8.7349 vs 8.7973, ~0.7σ) and the task column by raw count (140 vs 137, p=0.66) — but it is the arm drifted furthest from base on the protocol KLD (0.12427 vs 0.12150 = 0.98σ vs BF16 ref; same sign vs the interim rlmini ref, 0.4σ → 3/3 refs). NETPURE — blind, imatrix-free, never trained on the 9B — is the one closest to base. Both directions live inside noise, which is exactly why the verdict column stays a tie.

The hand-law control also earned its slot: LAW is top-of-ranking on the BF16 ref (0.12094) and co-top on Q8 (0.12270) — never scored on tasks by design, but the hand-law allocation is not fidelity-nonsense; its PPL hole closed at 8.7879 ±0.0625.

The stock control row: plain Q4_K_M (2026-10-23, running now)

The row the top never had: Ornith-1.5-9B-Q4_K_M.gguf (5,780,090,240 B), quantized from the BF16 base by plain llama-quantize Q4_K_M — no imatrix, no allocator, the vendor heuristic exactly as anyone gets it. Through the full shelf right now: HE (164 tasks, same protocol) → HE+ (evalplus) → PPL (wiki canary) → KLD (wiki, vs the BF16 ref). Numbers land here when the run closes; the duel column pair is already armed (stock vs netpure, stock vs smse, McNemar exact).

The vendor fingerprint, counted from the file (scripts/audit_tiers.py --per-layer, the same tool over all three arms):

build	file	tensors above Q4	notes
stock Q4_K_M	5.78 GB	Q6 ×35, Q8 ×0	static llama.cpp pattern: attn_qkv+ffn_down Q6 on layers 0,1,2,6,9,12,18,21,24,28–31 (attn_v on the full-attention layers 3,15,27,31,32) + output head; layers 4,5,7,8,… at full Q4
Gnom (netpure)	5.31 GB	Q8 ×23, Q5 ×1	Q8 = first blocks' attn_qkv/attn_gate/ssm_alpha/ssm_beta layers 1–4 + heads — the exact zone the Fracture labels call the epicenter
SMSE (imatrix)	5.31 GB	Q5 ×82, Q8 ×8	the activation-magnitude pyramid through attention projections + gates

Three sentences of physics from that table: (1) the stock carries +470 MiB more than either allocator and places every upgrade by a frozen layer-list, not by a measurement — not one tensor above Q6, no Q8 anywhere; (2) layers 0–2 happen to be covered, but layers 4–8 — the measured damage epicenter of this family — sit at untouched full Q4; (3) both allocator builds spend a smaller budget and still aim Q8 at the zone the blame lives in. The answer landed same day (16:17): the stock ties BOTH allocator builds on tasks (0/3 both duels: HE p=1.00/0.69, HE+ p=0.60/0.17, empties p=0.45/1.00) while paying +470 MiB — and collapses the fidelity board: KLD 0.16304 = +34% over the best arm, the worst tail of all five builds (max 30.60), the worst canary PPL 8.8456, and more refusals than Gnom (18 vs 14). The frozen pattern buys nothing and pays the physics price; "fewer bytes, same scores" is now measured, not assumed.

Sources: scripts/audit_tiers.py audit dumps 2026-10-23; battery in flight shelf_9b_stockq4.log, sidecar-stamped when closed.

Sources: eval_results/humaneval_ornith5300{netpure,smse}* (sidecar-stamped, git 8cce6d2), duel run 2026-10-23; HE shelf_9b.log, fidelity legs shelf_9b_kld.log (rlmini/Q8-forge interim), shelf_9b_kld_wiki.log (Q8 ref, closed 04:24), shelf_9b_ref_ab.log (BF16 ref, closed 06:52); refs assets/refs/ref_ornith{q8,bf16}_wiki.dat — 73,599,454,980 B each, byte-identical format (BF16 ref kept on disk); stock control row shelf_9b_stockq4.log + eval_results/humaneval_ornithstockq4km* (in flight 2026-10-23, sidecars land with the run, fingerprint via scripts/audit_tiers.py); HE column = runner's per-task passed (.jsonl_results.jsonl); evalplus base_status disagrees by the usual ~0.5pp harness gap (136/139).

Pre-registered: the 9B test (written 2026-10-22, before the result)

The 4B shelf could not separate the allocations (0/3 columns on four of five pairs). The 9B can: at the Q4 floor (5300 MiB) the two allocations differ in 97 tensors of 442, so the verdict column finally has the power to tell them apart.

	Q8_0	Q5_K	Q4_K	the bet
SMSE (imatrix)	layer 32 only	82 (layers 0, 3, 7, 13–31)	168	a broad Q5 pyramid through the middle
Gnom (zero-shot)	layers 1–4 + 32	1	230	depth is safe at Q4; bits only on the first blocks

(layer 32 in Q8 in both arms is the allocator's fallback for the last block, not a decision of either method.)

Provenance: the ranker behind the Gnom arm was trained on the 1.7B/4B rlmini legs only — the 9B leg was not in its training set, so this is a genuine zero-shot on an unseen model.

Pre-registered outcomes (recorded before the batteries finished):

result	what it means
Gnom ≥ SMSE on HE/HE+	the law transfers to a hybrid architecture it never saw — the first capability win for the learned allocator
SMSE clearly better	"early layers are fragile" is transformer-specific and fails on the recurrent/SSM hybrid: the deep blocks cannot hold Q4 here. The ranker gets a boundary of applicability — worth more than a win
tie on capability	as on Spark: capability does not separate them and the win stays quality-per-megabyte. Then the next fight is below Q4, where the arms diverge on 117/442 tensors
empties trend deeper (recorded as a third, separate axis)	on the 4B, empties were monotonic in the depth of the upgrade (SMSE blk.27 → 9 empties, LAWONLY blk.7 → 13, Gnom blk.0 → 18). If it repeats on the 9B, the first blocks govern decisiveness, not just signal — and the right answer would be Q8 for the first blocks, but not F16 for them wholesale

Falsification controls, built before the result (models/netpred_ornith_law.json, models/netpred_ornith_deep.json): if the "deep" arm — the opposite bet — also wins, then the win was not about depth at all. One command from a build, no re-training.

The named risk. If the 9B hybrid's depth genuinely cannot hold Q4, that is not the law failing: the ranker was trained on Spark (1.7B/4B) and knows nothing about recurrent blocks. The 9B's own labels do support the bet (57.2% of the damage in layers 0–5, 8.9% in ≥24, blocks 0–2 at 7.4× the middle) — so a collapse would indict the transfer, not the measurement.

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One model, one byte budget, three beliefs about where the bits go. Spark-X2.6-4B (released hours after its weights leaked; same spark2_5 architecture as X2.5, post-training only). All three MERNIK arms are the same 2254.8 MiB with the same tier multiset (Q4_K ×213 + Q5_K ×4) — they differ only in which tensors got the Q5.

allocation	who chose	PPL (wiki)	max KLD vs BF16	mean Δp
stock Q4_K_M (2479.8 MiB)	llama.cpp heuristic	20.6148	17.65	−1.015%
SMSE	the imatrix (layer 27)	19.2660	17.77	−0.733%
LAWONLY	the depth law, by hand (layer 7)	18.6080	18.71	−0.445%
Gnom (netpure)	the ranker trained on measured damage (layer 0)	18.3646	14.17	−0.306%

The learned ranker beats the static lens and a hand-picked reading of its own law — and by 24% on the tail. The monotone prior cannot see the layer-0 spike; the ranker can.

The PPL ladder — llama-perplexity on wikitext-2-raw test, ctx 1024, seed 7. Same corpus, same harness; PPL is the canary, but it is the cheapest cross-build comparison we have, so it gets written down:

build	weight	PPL	note
MERNIK-2250-Gnom	2254.8 MiB	18.3646	Gnom-driven (Q5 on layer 0)
MERNIK-2250-LAWONLY	2254.8 MiB	18.6080	law picked by hand (layers 7, 11)
MERNIK-4050-GNOMF16	4053.4 MiB	18.6228	F16 on the fragile layers (46 tensors)
BF16 base (anchor)	7848.7 MiB	18.8263	zero-loss reference, not a quant
stock Q8_0	4172.3 MiB	19.0307	"almost lossless" (KLD 0.0061 — 27× closer to BF16)
MERNIK-2250-SMSE	2254.8 MiB	19.2660	imatrix-driven (Q5 on layer 27)
stock Q4_K_M	2479.8 MiB	20.6148	vendor mix (853 MiB in Q6)

The three 2255 MiB arms beat the stock Q8_0 on PPL while being 46% smaller — but the KLD column below says plainly what Q8 buys: it is 27× closer to the BF16 base (mean KLD 0.0061 vs 0.1769) and keeps the argmax on 96.94% of positions against our ~82%. Q8 is the honest "touch nothing" reference; our arms are the cheap ones, and what they trade away is written down in the same table.

The KLD column, in full — every build against the same BF16 reference (wiki test, 302 chunks, ctx 1024, llama-perplexity --kl-divergence --kl-divergence-base):

metric	stock Q4_K_M	stock Q8_0	MERNIK-2250-SMSE	MERNIK-2250-Gnom	MERNIK-2250-LAWONLY	MERNIK-4050-GNOMF16
Mean KLD	0.166641 ± 0.000872	0.006139 ± 0.000161	0.180843 ± 0.000904	0.176940 ± 0.000894	0.178306 ± 0.000894	0.062301 ± 0.000481
Maximum KLD	17.646482	6.612764	17.770252	14.172658	18.709267	13.859949
99.9% KLD	4.042008	0.442399	4.074759	4.134612	3.953914	2.491301
99.0% KLD	1.346914	0.059898	1.493514	1.490102	1.489377	0.624270
95.0% KLD	0.582286	0.016562	0.644909	0.637474	0.640173	0.209655
90.0% KLD	0.386221	0.009498	0.425906	0.414667	0.419712	0.127790
Median KLD	0.077591	0.001394	0.083268	0.080211	0.081173	0.025654
Mean Δp	-1.015 ± 0.024	-0.083 ± 0.005	-0.733 ± 0.024	-0.306 ± 0.024	-0.445 ± 0.024	0.089 ± 0.015
Maximum Δp	99.747	97.502	99.924	99.639	99.818	98.523
99.9% Δp	55.175	12.304	63.900	67.559	65.434	46.425
99.0% Δp	25.209	4.206	28.549	30.309	29.513	18.499
95.0% Δp	10.534	1.671	11.624	12.468	12.188	7.753
90.0% Δp	5.344	0.869	5.888	6.464	6.336	4.214
75.0% Δp	0.560	0.117	0.695	0.907	0.838	0.680
Median Δp	-0.015	-0.000	-0.009	-0.002	-0.004	-0.000
Minimum Δp	-99.741	-98.934	-99.072	-99.094	-98.129	-99.536
RMS Δp	9.444 ± 0.055	1.904 ± 0.046	9.539 ± 0.052	9.398 ± 0.053	9.460 ± 0.052	5.817 ± 0.046
Same top p	82.199 ± 0.097	96.940 ± 0.044	81.482 ± 0.099	81.769 ± 0.098	81.644 ± 0.099	88.864 ± 0.080

The imatrix carries across the model version almost unchanged (Spearman 0.9964, top-50 overlap 100% between X2.5 and X2.6), so the X2.5 labels applied to X2.6 without re-measuring. That is why the arms above are comparable at all.

The verdict column — all five arms, all pairs

arm	weight	HE	HE+	empties	PPL	max KLD	same-top
stock Q8_0	4172.3 MiB	140/164 (85.37%)	132/164 (80.49%)	13	19.0307	6.61	96.94%
stock Q4_K_M	2479.8 MiB	139/164 (84.76%)	132/164 (80.49%)	14	20.6148	17.65	82.20%
MERNIK-2250-LAWONLY	2254.8 MiB	137/164 (83.54%)	127/164 (77.44%)	13	18.6080	18.71	81.64%
MERNIK-2250-Gnom	2254.8 MiB	136/164 (82.93%)	130/164 (79.27%)	18	18.3646	14.17	81.77%
MERNIK-2250-SMSE	2254.8 MiB	136/164 (82.93%)	130/164 (79.27%)	9	19.2660	17.77	81.48%
MERNIK-4050-GNOMF16	4053.4 MiB	134/164 (81.71%)	129/164 (78.66%)	16	18.6228	13.86	88.86%

Every pair, arbitrated by scripts/duel.py (McNemar exact, α = 0.05):

duel	HE	HE+	empties	verdict
stock Q4_K_M vs Q8_0	p=1.00	p=1.00	p=1.00	0/3 — noise
stock Q4_K_M vs GNOMF16	p=0.38	p=0.66	p=0.77	0/3 — noise
Q8_0 vs GNOMF16	p=0.34	p=0.73	p=0.58	0/3 — noise
Gnom vs SMSE	p=1.00	p=1.00	p=0.035	1/3 — empties only
Gnom vs LAWONLY	p=1.00	p=0.73	p=0.33	0/3 — noise

What the whole shelf actually says (honest reading).

1. At this scale the verdict column cannot separate any of the allocations — 0 of 3 columns for four of the five pairs. The three 2250 MiB arms (SMSE / Gnom / LAWONLY) score the same HE (136 / 136 / 137) and even swap tasks symmetrically (Gnom vs SMSE: 15 stock-only vs 15 Gnom-only discordant pairs, p=1.00). Which three tensors get the Q5 does not move capability.
2. The one column that did separate is empties, and it points against us: Gnom gives up on 18 tasks vs SMSE's 9 (p=0.035) — and it is monotonic in depth: the deeper the upgrade (SMSE blk.27/35 → 9 empties; LAWONLY blk.7 → 13; Gnom blk.0 → 18). Protect the earliest blocks and the model becomes more hesitant. But: that p=0.035 is 1 of 15 comparisons run tonight, so it does not survive multiple-comparison correction (Bonferroni 0.0033) — it is a lead to chase, not a result.
3. Q8_0 — the near-lossless reference — is NOT better than Q4_K_M (140 vs 139 HE, all columns p=1.00). At 4B scale capability is indifferent to fidelity across this whole range, which kills the "just use Q8" intuition and vindicates spending the bytes elsewhere.
4. So the win is not capability — it is quality-per-megabyte: the same verdict (indistinguishable), 9.1% less weight, a 20% cheaper tail (max KLD 14.17 vs 17.65) and 2.25 better PPL. The PPL/KLD advantages are real measurements that do not convert into capability at this intervention size.

And the honest bottom line for the write-up: the damage law (first blocks carry the damage) is a measurement — it is what the KLD labels say, and it transfers across architectures. Whether spending bits there buys capability is a separate question that at 4B/3-tensor scale the instrument cannot answer. It stays open, and the heavier arms (46 tensors in F16, the 9B with a looser budget, the sub-4 regime) are where it can be tested.

And the limit of the claim. Moving 3 tensors out of 290 is below what the verdict column can resolve (13-task floor). The law has to show up where the intervention is larger — the F16-blend arm (46 tensors in F16) or the 9B, where the budget is looser.

What is in the files (read straight from the GGUF headers — the allocation, not a claim):

	stock Q4_K_M	MERNIK-2250 (any arm)	stock Q8_0	MERNIK-4050-GNOMF16
Q4_K	180 (1620.8 MiB)	213 (2011.7 MiB)	—	—
Q5_K	—	4 (237.2 MiB)	—	—
Q6_K	37 (853.1 MiB)	—	—	44
Q8_0	—	—	217	85
F16	—	—	—	46 (1510 MiB)
attn_proj	Q4_K×54 Q6_K×18	Q4_K×70 Q5_K×2	—	—
ffn_down	Q4_K×18 Q6_K×18	Q4_K×36	—	—
gate	Q4_K×36	Q4_K×35 Q5_K×1	—	—

The stock mix spends 853 MiB in Q6 (and gives ffn_down the lion's share of it); the 2250 arms spend 237 MiB in Q5 on four tensors. 3.6× less high-tier weight, better perplexity, 9% smaller file — that is the project thesis in two rows: measured importance beats blind spreading. The whole gap between SMSE and Gnom is three tensors: SMSE upgrades blk.27.attn_gate/qkv + blk.35.attn_output; Gnom upgrades blk.0.attn_gate/qkv + blk.11.attn_output — same count, same bytes, and that is the entire difference between 19.2660 and 18.3646. Whether that shows up in the verdict column is an open question: three tensors out of 290 is a small intervention, and the verdict column has a 13-task floor. The heavier arms (46 tensors in F16, the 9B) are where the law can actually be tested.

The law behind it (measured on rlmini KLD labels, three models, transfers zero-shot):

model	share of damage in layers 0–5	in layers ≥24
Spark-1.7B-Q4 (measured)	43.2%	3.2%
Spark-4B-Q4 (measured)	36.4%	7.4%
Ornith-1.5-9B (ranker zero-shot)	48.3%	6.4%

---

1. The two rings (revised 2026-10-16)

MERNIK strictly separates allocation signals from capability certification:

Ring	Columns	Role	Cadence
Fast / Allocator	PPL only	per-decision canary for the queue	every run
Slow / Verdict	HE, HE+, KLD	the only columns authorized to crown or kill a build	once per release

Rule: Allocator signals never certify. Capability scores never steer. Mixing them leads to the PPL disease.

2026-10-16 revision. KLD moved from the allocator ring to the verdict ring: the KLD column is a full-model measurement against the unquantized base over the whole corpus (302 chunks, ~24 min/build), not a cheap per-decision signal. PPL is now the only fast-ring column — and it is a canary: cheap, always available, and frequently misleading (it saturates on reasoning-critical layers and can be bought by sharpening). A build that only wins on PPL has won nothing.

KLD's blind spots stand as recorded: fixed span, fixed chunks, Flash-Attention — blind to long context, instruction drift, and tool formats. It is a fidelity column, not a capability column.

Decision rules. Divergence — if metrics disagree, KLD wins allocator arguments; if they agree, trust the pair. Silence is signal — empty completions scale with weakness (Ox 4–5 → Neo 20–27 → Q2_K 63 → S2 115; Mellum-10000 24 → 7500 35 → Q6 39); weak models go silent rather than babble. Decisiveness is governed by the finetune, not model size (on Qwen3.5 bones, Neo hesitates while OxCoder commits). Saturation rule — bases at ~98% cannot resolve fine differences; capability duels need bases at 60–85% or they only answer the collapse threshold.

The rules (all of them, in one place)

1. Allocator signals never certify. Capability scores never steer. Mixing them is how the PPL disease started.
2. PPL is a canary — never quoted without that label, and never as a result.
3. Verdicts travel with MDE. A difference of 5 tasks out of 164 is a direction, not a rank. Below ~8–10 tasks nothing is reproducible.
4. The verdict column certifies preservation, not rank (nine-way tie at the top: 151, then eight on 150).
5. Every claim carries a number, a date, and a source (a file, a repo link, a battery tag). A claim without all three is a story, not a measurement.
6. One table per subject. The same numbers must not appear in two sections — link instead. Family tables live on their own cards for exactly this reason.
7. Dead results stay filed, with the number that killed them — that is how we avoid re-testing them.
8. A censored unit is never imputed. TERMINAL records (damage: null, retryable: false) are visible and excluded by construction, not filled in.
9. Cross-family verdicts are void — different models, different rulers.

---

2. The laws (all of them, in one place)

Everything we have learned about where quantization damage lives and what to do about it. Each law carries the number that proves it.

L0 — The sub-4 law (confirmed 2026-09-23)

Any tier below Q4 hurts, and fewer is better. Sub-4 exposure at ~4 GB is lava in every family: MiMo-4500-SMAPE (PPL 10.53 / HE 29.88%) lands exactly where NeoHorse-3650-Q2 did (10.36 / 23.78%) — same physics, different bones. SMSE-4500 (9.41 / 54.88%, +25pp) proves that limiting sub-4 exposure rescues the build. TOX (×2.0 effective-MSE penalty, constants.py) called it; SMSE proved it on the verdict column.

L1 — The budget law (SMAPE small, MSE big)

SMAPE owns small budgets, MSE owns big ones. Direction only, not rank — the legs differ by 5–6 tasks, below the 13-task resolution floor (6500: 141 vs 135; 5100: 136 vs 131). The lava leg survives on 3/3 columns plus effect size. Above Q4, utilities debate inside the floor; below Q4, physics decides.

Floor-first confirmation (Mellum, 2026-10-10): the MoE floor sits at 7428 MiB — no build below it without sub-Q4 tiers (5500 arithmetically impossible; 5688 even with Q3 allowed). At 6500: SMSE 126 vs recovery 123 vs stock Q4 125 — the whole shelf is one tie-zone, and the weights differ (ours 1 GB lighter).

L2 — The depth law: the first blocks carry the damage (2026-10-21)

Where this came from (first person). I checked my own first hand-made quant — gemma-4-12B-it-SHQ6, June 2026, a manual allocation I wrote before any of this was measurable. Its card already said it: layers 0-1 are 3228× more important than middle layers (23, 35); attention projections on the first layer (attn_q, score 5.11e8) dominate the importance distribution. The community noticed the effect without knowing the cause ("truly black magic", and it beat unsloth's Q4_K_XL while being smaller and faster).

Six months later the same thing showed up again — on families that differ enormously architecturally:

model	family	damage in layers 0–5	in layers ≥24	how measured
gemma-4-12B-it	dense, 48 layers	—	—	manual imatrix, June 2026 (SHQ6)
Spark-X2.5-1.7B	hybrid SWA, 28 layers	43.2%	3.2%	KLD labels (teacher)
Spark-X2.5-4B	hybrid SWA, 36 layers	36.4%	7.4%	KLD labels (teacher)
Ornith-1.5-9B	hybrid + SSM, 33 layers	57.2%	8.9%	KLD labels (teacher, blind to the ranker)

A ranker trained on the 1.7B/4B legs predicted the Ornith profile before it was measured (48.3% vs 6.4% predicted; 57.2% vs 8.9% measured) — zero-shot transfer across architecture, direction and magnitude both right.

On the 9B the hot band is 7.4× the middle of the stack: mean damage in blocks 0–2 is +0.00217 against +0.00029 for blocks 10–30. The fingerprint is stable too: the hottest blocks on the 9B are 0, 1, 2, 3 and 11 — and the Gnom arm on the 4B independently picked blk.0 and blk.11. Different families, different sizes, different instruments (the imatrix by hand in June, the teacher in October, the ranker as a prediction) — the same fingerprint.

So the law is not "a property of that model": the first blocks are where quantization damage lives, and the error there has not yet been smoothed by the layers above it.

The mechanism: activation magnitude grows with depth, so the imatrix keeps handing bits to the late layers while measured reasoning damage lives early. The two allocations disagree on purpose, and the disagreement is the experiment:

Ornith-9B	SMSE @5310	Gnom @5310	SMSE @4000	Gnom @4000
Q8	15	30	15	32
Q6	0	3	0	3
Q5	88	4	44	1
Q4	162	228	78	113
IQ2 (sub-4)	—	—	117	110
tensors moved	—	103/442	—	117/442

SMSE builds a pyramid (88 Q5 in the middle); Gnom says "Q4 everywhere, bits only to the early peaks" — and its leg is leaner (4 Q5 vs 88), which is L0 ("fewer is better") applied to the upper tiers. At 4000 both arms fall into sub-4 (lava), so the meaningful duel is at the Q4 floor.

L3 — Which block exactly is architecture-specific — and that is why a learned ranker wins

The zone is always the first blocks; which one spikes is a property of the architecture: layer 0 vs the average of layers 1–3 is 4.6× (4B Q4), 3.3× (4B Q3), 2.3× (1.7B Q4), but only 1.1× on the 9B, where the hot band is 0–2 with blk.1 on top.

A monotone prior ("damage decays with depth") cannot express a band or a spike — it puts the first block at rank 1 or 2 and stops thinking. The learned ranker can, because it learns the profile, not the trend: on the 4B it upgrades blk.0.attn_gate/qkv where the hand-picked law build takes blk.7. That single decision is worth −0.24 PPL (18.3646 vs 18.6080) — the gap between the learned allocator and the best monotone reading of its own law. Read L2 and L3 together: the law says early, the ranker says which early.

External confirmation (the literature caught up)

The law above was found by hand (June 2026) and measured (October 2026). Four independent papers published in the same window describe the same physics:

• arXiv:2608.08188 — Quantization Degradation in LLMs: A Signal-Noise Perspective (CASIA, 8 Aug 2026). Degrades to two linked processes: how errors arise inside a module, and how they accumulate across layers (R(l+1) ≈ G(l)·R(l) + Q(l)). The propagated error dominates at every depth, the per-layer source error becomes secondary as errors build up — and their closing sentence is our thesis in their words: "the goal is to control the errors that drive downstream degradation, rather than to minimize all errors uniformly."
• arXiv:2504.09629 — Quantization Error Propagation: Revisiting Layer-Wise PTQ (Apr 2025): the activation difference grows exponentially with depth — the mathematical form of the snowball.
• arXiv:2505.15909 — Is (Selective) Round-To-Nearest Quantization All You Need? (Kogan, MIT, 21 May 2025). Selective precision by layer: for smaller Llama models perplexity improves fastest when the first layers stay in 8-bit; and crucially which layers pay is architecture-specific — middle for Llama-3.1-405B, last for Phi-3-mini and Dolly-v2. That is exactly our L3: the zone is early, the exact block is the model's business — which is why a learned ranker beats a hand-picked rule.
• arXiv:2411.07191 — The Super Weight in Large Language Models (Jul 2025): the few weights whose damage destroys the model sit in mlp.down_proj of the early layers, consistently across Llama, Mistral and OLMo.

Read together: the mechanism (errors born early are amplified through the depth), the practical consequence (keep the early blocks precise), and the caveat (which block is architecture- specific) are all established independently. MERNIK's contribution is the measurement instrument — per-tensor damage labels on a reasoning corpus, and a ranker that transfers the rule to models it has never seen.

L4 — The 1D/F32 law

The binary writes 1D tensors (norms, biases) and ssm_conv1d as F32 whatever the rules say, so the allocator pins them outside the budget. --pin-norms was removed as a proven no-op (it changed 0 tensors); the old "norms are load-bearing precision" reading was budget-redirect, not precision. The pre-flight audit catches exactly this class of mistake.

L5 — Saturation rule

Bases at ~98% cannot resolve fine differences (97% vs 96%). Capability duels require bases at 60–85%, or they only answer the collapse threshold.

---

3. Quick Start & CLI

Basic execution

pip install -r requirements.txt

# 1. Preview tier allocation & dry-run (~1 sec)
python main.py --model M.gguf --imatrix M.imatrix.gguf --size 6800

# 2. Execute actual quantization
python main.py --model M.gguf --imatrix M.imatrix.gguf --size 6800 --run

Stock llama.cpp binaries required (llama-quantize, llama-perplexity, llama-server); override with LLAMA_QUANTIZE, LLAMA_PPL, LLAMA_SERVER.

Flags

Flag	Description
--model M.gguf	Source GGUF — required for allocation; not needed for verify-only
--imatrix I.gguf	Importance lens; repeatable. In the normal path llama-quantize gets the first file for both the queue and the binary; extra files only check lens divergence. To combine lenses for real, build one merged imatrix with llama-imatrix, then pass it alone
--imatrix-method max|mean	Legacy-only (--legacy-modes --imatrix-legacy-combine); has no effect in the normal path
--imatrix-tol F	Max relative importance spread across repeated --imatrix files before refusal (default 1%)
--size MIB	Target file size in MiB (default: 6800). The Q4_K floor is tried first; if it does not fit, the allocator falls back to IQ2_XXS, then IQ1_S
--dont-allow-q3	Keep the Q4_K floor even when --size is smaller; fail instead of dropping to IQ2/IQ1
--output O.gguf	Output path (default: <model-basename>-MERNIK.gguf in the current directory)
--run	Execute llama-quantize; without it: allocation + dry-run only
--utility NAME	Queue gain: mse (default), smse, smape, gnom (active path). netpure/netfd are deprecated aliases for gnom
--netpred P	Gnom predicted-damage table (required by --utility gnom)
--legacy-modes	Unlock archived utilities and flags for reproduction only — see LEGACY.md
--top-down	Start quantizable 2D groups at F16, downgrade cheapest-loss-first to fit, then spend the slack. Structural pins (MTP/embd/routers) and 1D F32 stay outside the queue
--verify gpqa|he|all	Slow-ring verify on a fresh --run build or an existing --output (busy port aborts LOUDLY)
--verify-tag TAG	Result tag (default: from --output basename)
--show-config	Print the tensor map and exit before dry-run
--dump-alloc PATH	Write the final tensor map + stats as JSON; real dry-run geometry is included only when preflight ran
--no-preflight / --strict-preflight	Skip the dry-run audit, or abort if any assigned tier cannot fire (default: audit runs, ~1s)

Archived flags (--pin-small, --max-tier, --free-pins, --legacy-1d, --imatrix-legacy-combine, --allow-q3-or-lower, plus the legacy utility knobs) are hidden from --help and require --legacy-modes; see LEGACY.md.

Utility modes

Gnom is the active allocator. The three core lenses stay because they define the baseline ladder; every historical lens is archived in LEGACY.md behind --legacy-modes.

mode	belief	status
mse (default)	relative-blind absolute gain; tiers spread evenly (Q5/Q6-heavy middle)	baseline; best PPL/KLD on dense 9B
smape	barbell: junk to the Q4 floor, kings to Q8 penthouses	owns small budgets, loses big ones (L1)
smse	geometric mean of SMAPE-relative and MSE-absolute halves; carries the sub-4 toxicity through its absolute half	best hand-tuned baseline; owns small+medium budgets
gnom	per-group predicted damage is the gain; --top-down is the F16-blend direction, bottom-up is the floor direction	active path; smooth ladder from 4500 to 9000 MiB on Ling-3.0-tiny

netpure and netfd are deprecated aliases for gnom (bottom-up and top-down respectively).

Recently added (2026-09-28 → 2026-10-16, all CPU-cheap, all verified)

• scripts/fuse_layers.py --expect "15:b,..." — gates the resolved donor map (ranges expanded, tissue suffixes checked); exits 2 with a diff before one output byte. Plus a soup shape-guard: mismatched donor shapes fail LOUD, never a corrupt file.
• scripts/group_damage_sweep.py --units TAGS --timeout S --ngl N — subset sweeps; failures go to *.failures.jsonl, second failure of a unit becomes a TERMINAL censored label (damage: null, never retried, never imputed). --kld-only skips the plain-PPL pass and emits the 5-column KLD family.
• --max-tier F16 (archived behind --legacy-modes) lets kings rise above Q8_0 without touching constants.py; it reproduces the raised-ceiling geometry byte-exact in dry-run.
• MoE golden geometries: Mellum2.1 @7500 smse (Q4 171 / routers F16 ×28) and huber (Q4 163 / Q5 34) — regression net over a Mixture-of-Experts allocation. The golden set now has 16 geometries (model-dependent cases skip when the GGUF is absent) plus 8/8 provenance checks.
• scripts/run_humaneval.py: HE_CHUNK="start,count" slices the sorted task list; HE_CTX=N replaces the protocol default -c; serve_sha256 sidecar key + scripts/twin.py pre-battery twin gate (same sha → reuse, else measure).
• --cache-ram 0 on HE chains (164 distinct prompts share nothing, so the prompt cache only eats RAM — unbounded on hybrid archs); LLAMA_PPL_BATCH env overrides the sweep's hardcoded -b 512 (forge iGPU OOMs a 9B at 512; 128 holds).
• scripts/audit_tiers.py — tier auditing:

python scripts/audit_tiers.py --model M-6500.gguf
python scripts/audit_tiers.py --model M-6500.gguf --big 10
python scripts/audit_tiers.py --model M-6500.gguf --layer 31
python scripts/audit_tiers.py --model M-6500.gguf --per-layer   # every layer

• scripts/consolidate_labels.py — builds the clean label pool (corpus-tagged, dedup-checked) so a mixed archive can never leak into a training run again.
• scripts/shelf_x26.sh — resumable measurement queue (one GPU job at a time, skips finished arms): KLD vs BF16 → HE batteries → HE+ per arm.

Example: mapping the α-axis (dry-runs, CPU seconds)

for A in 0.1 0.25 0.5 0.75 0.9; do
  python main.py --model M.gguf --imatrix M.imatrix.gguf --size 3500 \
    --utility powalpha --pow-alpha $A --legacy-modes   # archived α-axis
done
python main.py --model M.gguf --imatrix M.imatrix.gguf --size 3500 \
  --utility logratio --legacy-modes       # archived: extreme barbell
python main.py --model M.gguf --imatrix M.imatrix.gguf --size 3500 \
  --utility smse --hinge-w 0.5 --legacy-modes  # archived sub-4 boost

---

4. Engine mechanics

Queue & allocation principles

The default main.py path: every tensor starts at a floor tier based on its functional class. A global max-heap drains the target budget best-first by sum(importance) × Δ / MiB. Tied groups (identical imatrix energy) upgrade as a single unit with summed importance. Structural pins — MTP heads (→ Q8_0), output/token embeddings (→ Q5_K), MoE routers (assigned F16, F32 in file) — sit outside the budget queue. The water-fill prototype below keeps the same groups and pins but replaces the heap.

Certify vs report (tool boundary)

Three tools, two jobs. scripts/manifest.py and scripts/ledger.py REPORT: build→model identity (three keys: score+time+family) and standings generated from artefacts — every number travels with its identity status. scripts/duel.py ARBITRATES: paired McNemar across the columns, refuses to average across harnesses. Nothing certifies except a significant duel; everything else is a report.

Pre-flight audit & the size ceiling

Every invocation runs a dry-run audit (~1s) comparing intended vs actually-written tiers per tensor — the only thing that can catch a --tensor-type rule that cannot fire. Bottom-up caps every class at CLASS_MAX_TIER, so a model can saturate below --size: MiniCPM5-2B caps at exactly 2359.4 MiB, and --size 2600 silently produced a 2359 MiB file. It now says so loudly and names the blocking classes.

Norms shield & attention core insights (re-labelled 2026-09-28)

TD-MSE vs MSE: −3.7pp HE with identical PPL (7.7701 vs 7.7695). The old reading ("norms are load-bearing walls for code") is mechanically impossible (L4): no norm was ever requantized. What the numbers measure is budget redirect: top-down routing moved ~5 MiB between tied attention groups while the "shield" guarded precision that was never spent. The Norms Shield (TDN) +1.2pp stands as a measured effect with a redirect mechanism, not a precision mechanism.

Distribution comparison @ 6500 MiB (427 tensors, incl. 177 F32 forced by the binary)

Tier      BU-MSE (spread)    BU-SMAPE (barbell)   TD-MSE       TD-SMAPE (F16 core)
F16       177 (2 MiB)        177 (2 MiB)          147 (2 MiB)  85 (949 MiB)
Q4_K      48 (972 MiB)       91 (1989 MiB)        71 (972)     236 (2368 MiB)
Q5_K      28 (1994 MiB)      3 (1345 MiB)         28 (1983)    7 (1411 MiB)
Q6_K      66 (2114 MiB)      7 (249 MiB)          71 (2127)    14 (486 MiB)
Q8_0      108 (1417 MiB)     149 (2913 MiB)       110 (1417)   85 (1287 MiB)

Takeaway: MSE fills the middle (Q5+Q6 = 94 tensors). SMAPE hollows it (10 tensors) to double the Q4 floor and gain 41 extra Q8 penthouses.

Water-fill prototype (scripts/waterfill.py)

A separate allocator experiment, not the default path: it reuses the same tied groups and pins as Gnom, but replaces the greedy heap with a discrete rate-distortion allocation. Gnom supplies the per-group damage amplitude G, and the model assumes

D_i(t) = G_i * 2^(-alpha * (b_t - b0_i))

where b_t is bits/weight at tier t. Negative G is clipped to zero and pinned to the floor. The floor is Q4_K and the ceiling is F16 (the usual per-class cap does not apply); tier choice is a discrete Lagrangian, and leftover bytes are spent by a greedy tail fill. alpha=2.4 is calibrated on paired Ling Q4→Q3 labels (median 2.54 / 2.23).

On Ling-3.0-tiny, against the NETPURE builds at the same target:

budget	build	MiB	PPL	KLD mean	KLD median	KLD max
—	stock Q4_K_M (vendor)	4600	13.327	0.114020	0.048512	14.354789
4500	NETPURE 4500	4507	13.503	0.095092	0.039573	8.715995
4500	WATERFILL 4500	4516	13.1785	0.074614	0.030849	10.109997
4500	WFGNOMV5 4500	4516	13.0555	0.070794	0.028326	9.388152
5100	NETPURE 5100	5091	13.4271	0.089046	0.037072	9.071382
5100	WATERFILL 5100	5116	13.0611	0.063126	0.025847	9.515678
5100	GNOMV5TD 5100 (greedy, v5)	5113	13.1311	0.062827	0.024551	10.694695
5100	WFGNOMV5 5100	5116	13.1289	0.050744	0.019695	9.858137

Against stock Q4_K_M at 4600 MiB, WATERFILL 4500 is 84 MiB smaller and better on every column: PPL −1.1%, mean KLD −35%, median −36%, max −30%. Against NETPURE at 4500 MiB: mean KLD −22%, median −22%, PPL −2.4%, at +9 MiB; max KLD is 16% worse (still below stock Q4_K_M's 14.35). At 5100 MiB against NETPURE: mean −29%, median −30%, PPL −2.7%, at +25 MiB; max KLD is 4.9% worse. That is a fidelity-per-byte result, not a clean sweep.

The v5 table moves both rungs again (2026-10-31). With the 5-fold Gnom predictions as the water-fill amplitude: at 4500 the sweep is clean — PPL −0.9%, mean −5.1%, median −8.2%, max −7.1% versus the old WATERFILL, and PPL −3.3% / mean −25.6% / median −28.4% versus NETPURE-4500 (max +7.7% above NETPURE, still −34.6% below stock Q4). At 5100 the mean drops −19.6% and the median −23.8% versus the old WATERFILL (PPL +0.5%, max +3.6%), and versus NETPURE-5100 mean −43.0%, median −46.9%, PPL −2.2% (max +8.7%). RMS Δp / same-top-p for the 5100 arm: 6.448% / 90.43% (stock Q4: 9.405% / 85.80%). The same v5 table in the plain greedy classifier (top-down, 5113 MiB) lands at mean 0.062827 — better than the old WATERFILL, worse than its own water-fill. The 4500/6500/9000 allocations and result files are kept in the local lab provenance (provenance/waterfill/, gitignored) and mirrored to the Hugging Face repo.

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5. Gnom — the learned ranker

What it is. A tiny neural ranker (150 params, CPU, seconds) that learns which tensors carry quantization damage instead of guessing importance from proxy signals. It is trained on measured damage labels, then ranks models it has never seen.

The labels — MERNIK-Fracture: per-tensor KLD damage on a reasoning corpus (rl_reasoning_mini), five columns per row (mean / max / median KLD + Δp RMS + same-top), deterministic, uniform schema across models and tiers. The 9B file took ~13 days of continuous sweeping; the 1.7B/4B legs minutes each. Cheap instruments are for the shelf; the expensive one is for the model you care about.

The corpus ships with the repo — corpus/rl_reasoning_mini.raw (343 prompts, 479,633 B, sha256 82b2e153…de400866fbe; the same bytes the forge and GTX-1070 legs measured against). Rebuilding a reference against it is one llama-perplexity --save-all-logits call on your machine, so a volunteer run reproduces the exact measurement stack.

What the labels bought (clean rlmini pool, 512 units, 768 tensors, 0 censored):

exam	result
strict leave-one-MODEL-out, trunk variant	LOMO 0.801 (bar 0.45, ×6 MDE) — held-out rl17 0.805, held-out rl4b 0.798
same, modelbias	0.689 PASS
same, moeshared	0.179 FAIL
static imatrix proxy (timp)	−0.103 (the learned ranker beats the proxy by a mile, on unseen models)
mixed 4-fold exam	moeshared LOMO 0.579, rank LOMO-acc 0.760

The old "no transfer" verdict was an artifact of contaminated labels; on clean data the transfer exists and is large. See L2 and L3 for what the ranker actually learned, and §0 for what it buys on a real build.

The teacher (5-column, KLD-only, 2026-10): group_damage_sweep.py --kld-only skips the plain-PPL pass (it lies) and scores five columns per unit against the unquantized reference on rl_reasoning_mini: damage_kld (mean), damage_kld_max (tail detonations), damage_kld_median (core), damage_dp_rms (decisiveness), damage_same_top (rank). ppl/damage are null — not measured.

• Machine split: the 9B (Ornith) sweeps on the 16 GB Vega-11 forge (memory-bandwidth-bound; a 9B is unreasonable to torture through a 1070), the 1.7B and 4B on the GTX 1070.
• Cost: 9B ≈ 90 min/unit × 210 = ~13 days continuous (the crown-jewel file); 1.7B ≈ 7.5 h; 4B ≈ 5 h.
• Result: the MERNIK-Fracture dataset — complete, clean, uniform schema — the origin of the project's current paradigm.

Adding a leg to the pool:

1. sweep the model: group_damage_sweep.py --model M.gguf --imatrix I.gguf --kld-base ref.dat --kld-only --drop-tier Q4_K (and Q3/Q2 for the curve);
2. build_features.py --model M.gguf --imatrix I.gguf --out gnom/features/<m>.npz;
3. scripts/consolidate_labels.py → clean pool + pool.json;
4. add the row to the pool file, retrain, check the bars (0.45 / 0.60).

Gnom artifact (2026-10-31, safetensors). The ranker ships as self-describing .safetensors artifacts. Deploy: gnom/artifacts/gnom_kfold_v5_2026-10-31.safetensors (schema MERNIK.gnom.multinet.v5) — 5-fold within-family × 3 seeds, folds grouped by unit tag (no same-unit leakage), 75 nets / 166,675 params. Clean 5-family pool (n=1165, quantizer pins filtered), out-of-fold Spearman: mean 0.527 — rl17 +0.738, lfm3 +0.659, rl4b +0.615, rl9b +0.489, ling_moe +0.134. The transfer floor for a new family is gnom_ensemble_v4_2026-10-31.safetensors (strict LOMO): mean 0.309 (sparks ~0.71, lfm3 0.52, Ornith/MoE negative). The honest limits: dense decoders work; Ornith is moderate; MoE is weak even in-family — the feature set has no expert-routing signal. Packer: scripts/pack_gnom.py.

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6. Slow-ring protocol (HumanEval execution)

Server (one model at a time, GPU is a strict queue):

llama-server -m MODEL.gguf --port 28082 -ngl 99 -c 8192 --jinja --log-disable

Sampling (protocol default):

temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 20, min_p 0.0,
presence_penalty 0.0, repetition_penalty 1.0, max_tokens 2048

presence_penalty 1.5 (vendor recipe) breaks thinking templates; 0.0 verified. Preflight /health before every battery; mid-run watchdog every 10 tasks (dead server aborts LOUDLY, never scores empties silently). Long-ctx servers accumulate commit (KV + prompt cache never shrink) — chunked batteries (HE_CHUNK, fresh server per ~30 tasks, stitch in order) plus --cache-ram 0 (164 distinct prompts share nothing). Family sampling: thinking families run their vendor recipe (K2: temp 1.0 + top_p 0.95 only, top_k 40 / min_p 0.05 = llama defaults, ctx 16384, --reasoning-effort high; Spark-X2.6: temp 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 0, min_p 0.05, effort high, ctx 16384, max_tokens 8192) — cross-family verdict comparisons stay void, different rulers. Runner: scripts/run_humaneval.py (env HE_*, HE_CHUNK, HE_CTX, HUMANEVAL_OUT, HUMANEVAL_SERVER; HUMANEVAL_SERVE_MODEL = self-serve with auto-kill). Eval: human_eval.evaluation.evaluate_functional_correctness, pass@1, k=[1]. Results: eval_results/humaneval_<tag>.jsonl. Strictness upgrade: every battery is rescored with EvalPlus HumanEval+ (80× tests, CPU) — the HE+ column.

Reproduce any number below (runner + rescorer ship in this repo):

export HUMANEVAL_SERVE_MODEL=/path/to/MODEL.gguf HUMANEVAL_OUT=eval_results/humaneval_mytag.jsonl
export HE_TEMP=1.0 HE_TOP_P=0.95 HE_TOP_K=20 HE_MIN_P=0.0 HE_PRESENCE=0.0 HE_MAX_TOKENS=2048
python scripts/run_humaneval.py          # serves, runs 164 tasks, kills server, writes .meta.json sidecar
evalplus.evaluate humaneval --samples eval_results/humaneval_mytag.jsonl   # HE+ column

The .meta.json sidecar (model path, git sha, full sampling, timestamps) is written at battery time — it is what makes a new battery verifiable instead of permanent-unverifiable.

Answered 2026-09-29: the same file twice at temp 0.0 scored 98/164 twice, per-task verdicts 164/164 identical, completions 163/164 byte-identical. Greedy does not narrow the verdict column — it reproduces it. The column can stop being sampled: temp-0 batteries are certificates, temp-1.0 batteries are draws. (Caveat kept: the sampler skips RNG at temp ≤ 0, but logits still depend on batch composition — so far, no spread observed.)

Fast-ring diagnostic: GPQA-Recognition

Recognition decisiveness (first-token P(letter) over top-30, no CoT). Via scripts/gpqa_duel.py.

Build	GPQA-rec	HE pass@1	Note
Neo-MSE-6500	51.5%	85.98%	Thinker spreads first-token mass
Neo-SMAPE-5100	48.0%	82.93%	Compact barbell
Ox-MSE-6500	49.5%	90.24%	Decisive stabs the letter
Ox-SMAPE-5100	49.0%	88.41%	High task execution

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7. Reference results (links — the tables live on the family cards)

family	card	load-bearing line
NeoHorse-1-9B	wepiqx/NeoHorse-1-9B-MERNIK-GGUF	6500-MSE 141/164 (85.98%); 5100-SMAPE 136/164 ties stock Q6_K 135/164 at −2.2 GB
OxCoder-9B	wepiqx/OxCoder-9B-MERNIK-GGUF	SMSE-6500 150/164 (91.46%), Q8 148/164, SMAPE-5100 145/164 — one cluster, no crown inside it
RINIQ series (layer-fused)	wepiqx/RINIQ-GGUF	nine-way statistical tie (151, then eight on 150) — no crown, the top is shared
Mellum2.1-12B-A2.5B	wepiqx/Mellum2.1-12B-A2.5B-Thinking-MERNIK-GGUF	10000-SMSE 134/164 beats stock Q6 119/164 by +15 at −0.7 GB (3/3 SIGNIFICANT); 7500-SMSE ties stock Q4_K_M 125/125 (triple p=1.0)
FrogNano-4B	family card (lab notes)	the α-axis laboratory: 110→117→120→122→109, and stock Q6 wins the temp-0 duel 3/3 (−16 tasks real)
K2-Horizon-7B	family card	thinking family, saturated shelf: 5500 SMSE 147/164 vs stock Q4_K_M 152/164, Q6 148/164 — all inside the noise floor
Spark-X2.6-4B	family card	the current generation — see §0

The noise budget, as a number. Verdict noise is a binomial draw — SD 5.9 tasks/run at p=0.70, 8.3 for a difference of two runs. That IS the ±3.6pp band and IS the 8-task MTP re-run gap. Below ~8–10 tasks nothing is reproducible at n=164 — a property of the instrument, not a measurement error. Verdicts travel with MDE; the column certifies preservation, not rank (nine-way tie at the top: 151, eight on 150).

Verdict ledger (the duels that shaped the method — all pre-KLD-paradigm, kept so the same experiments are not re-run):

duel	numbers	verdict
MiMo-4500 SMSE vs SMAPE (allow-q3)	PPL 9.4092 vs 10.5343; HE 54.88% vs 29.88%	lava rescue (+25pp) — L0
MiMo-5100 SMSE vs stock	PPL 8.7389 vs 8.7435 (tie); HE 71.34% vs 70.12% (+1.2pp), 3 empties	0/3 (HE p=0.88, HE+ the other way, empties p=0.13) — NOISE, crown demoted
MiMo-6500 SMSE vs stock	PPL 8.7275 vs 8.7655 (tie); HE 72.56% vs 75.00% (−2.4pp)	SMSE loses big: at 6500 the middle decides (MSE Q6 67 vs SMSE 41), not penthouses
Mellum-10000 SMSE vs stock Q6	HE 134 vs 119, −0.7 GB	3/3 SIGNIFICANT — the one real quant-vs-stock win
FrogNano-3500 stock Q6 vs ours	temp-0 duel, −16 tasks	stock wins 3/3 — RL-sharpened base, allocation win absent
netdmg (Gnom modulator) vs SMSE	—	0/3 — manners without a verdict; became netpure
RINIQ crown	151, then eight on 150	nine-way tie — no crown, the top is shared

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8. Advanced experiments and lab notes

The repo carries several long-form notes that sit beside the code. They are lab notebooks, not required reading: each records one line of experiments, including the scars and dead ends. This README is the active documentation; LEGACY.md is the only one needed to reproduce archived flags.

file	what it is
DIARY.md	chronological session journal (2026-09-22 → 27), the context-restore file
FUSION.md	layer-interleaved fusions: donor maps, soup, shape guards, specimens
MIMO.md	MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B workbench and its distillate notes
MTP.md	speculative-decoding draft duels (speed vs verdict)
README-ZOO.md	utility-metric playground: the older MSE/SMAPE/SMSE duels
RINIQ-NEXT.md	Ox × MiMo fusion lineage, recipes and corrections
SAGA.md	the OxCoder+MTP graft saga, attempt by attempt
LEGACY.md	archived utility modes and removed flags, frozen for reproduction

MTP head grafting

Transplant of a 15-tensor (464 MB) MTP donor head onto OxCoder-9B via scripts/graft_mtp3.py. Draft engages (5–23% acceptance); economics negative (31→20 t/s on mismatched head). Mechanics proven; full saga in SAGA.md.

Teacher & Gini (v3, 2026-09-19)

Damage-sweep labels train the Gini allocator. v3 complete: 168/168 labels (Q5_K→Q2_K drops, MiniCPM5-2B, forge): damage −0.046…+0.515, mean 0.070, Gini 0.364, only 3 reliefs. Late units carry the signal (ffn_gate@41 +0.51, ffn_down@41 +0.33, ffn@39/40) + early attn@2. vs older teacher (Gini 0.498, max 0.173): bigger drops hit harder (max 3×) but spread wider (Gini lower) — signal with teeth, less concentrated. MLP un-paused: retrain Gnom on v3 → netdmg duel. Gini answers to Soulfate24. (Superseded as the main instrument by the KLD teacher and Gnom — §5.)

KLD battery & relief

KLD-vs-ref was the allocator's rank column (Soulfate24 battery: fixed span, fixed chunks, Flash-Attention). Measured relief ceilings (--relief) pin sweet-spot groups at Q4 and release their budget elsewhere. It is now a full-model verdict column (§1) — the same mechanism, measured against the BF16 base instead of a per-decision proxy.

Ceiling & inversion probes (2026-09-30/10-01)

• Ceiling map: RINIQ-M2-MAXF16 (9.01 GB, F16 core 123) measured PPL 7.7357 (worse than 6500-MSE's 7.5263), HE 137/164, HE+ 129 — +4 GB over the 5 GB cluster buys −13 tasks. Kings saturate (Q8→F16 gains nothing) while the Q4 tail drags: at big budgets the MIDDLE decides.
• Inversion (adversarial control, --invert / --invert-keep K): full priority flip at 8350 (PPL 7.6960, HE 145/164, HE+ 137) and at 5100 (PPL 7.5845, HE 145/164, HE+ 137) — duels vs honest arms 0/3 and 0/3. Flipped noise ties, so the lens carries nothing resolvable.
• Doctrine consequence: the FLOOR is the whole game, priority among Q4+ is noise (L0/L1).

F16-blend (--utility gnom --top-down)

At bigger budgets the useful move is not "which tensor gets one more tier" but "which tensor must not be touched at all". Gnom top-down keeps the fragile blocks in full precision and demotes by damage per byte saved. On X2.6-4B at 4050 MiB: 46 tensors in F16 (1510 MiB), PPL 18.6228 — beating a solid stock Q8_0 (4172 MiB, 19.0307) while being smaller. This is L2/L3 turned into an allocator mode.

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9. Architecture support

MERNIK has no supported-architecture list and no hand-maintained architecture table. Earlier versions required the architecture to be declared and kept a manual mapping; that path is gone. Today MERNIK runs llama-quantize --dry-run and consumes what the C++ loader reports: general.architecture, llama.cpp's generic metadata keys (<arch>.block_count, <arch>.expert_count, <arch>.expert_feed_forward_length, <arch>.nextn_predict_layers) and the full tensor inventory with shapes and source types. There is no preset table and no architecture-name fallback: if llama.cpp loads the model, MERNIK can allocate it; if llama.cpp cannot load it, both tools fail loudly before a byte is written.

The broad-coverage claim is a theory rather than an exhaustive test: not every architecture has been measured yet. That is not a support limit — an untested architecture is an untested path, not an unsupported one. There is no whitelist to reject it, and it should work as long as llama.cpp reports the standard metadata and tensor inventory. Tested examples are qwen35 (OxCoder, MiMo, Ornith, FrogNano), bailingmoe3 (Ling), mellum, spark2_5, k2-horizon, and llama (MiniCPM5). That is evidence, not a whitelist.

The same contract covers custom llama.cpp forks and their models: point LLAMA_QUANTIZE at the fork's binary and MERNIK reads the fork's loader output instead of assuming an upstream version. The dry run reads headers only, not tensor data (Ling BF16: ~0.2 s, ~77 KiB of output). llama_inspect.py is the adapter; the old model_reader.py is gone.

Special cases are derived from the same metadata:

• MTP: nextn_predict_layers, or nextn/blk.32 tensors, pin the head outside the regular layer count.
• MoE: expert_count > 0 or *_exps tensors; K-quant padding uses expert_feed_forward_length.
• 1D and ssm_conv1d: llama.cpp writes them F32, so the allocator pins them outside the budget.

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10. Ecosystem & repositories

• 📦 NeoHorse-1-9B-MERNIK-GGUF
• 📦 OxCoder-9B-MERNIK-GGUF
• 📦 MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B-GGUF-MERNIK
• 📦 RINIQ-GGUF
• 📦 RINIQ-NEXT-GGUF
• 📦 Ornith-1.5-9B-MTP-ASHQ1-GGUF
• 📦 Spark-X2.5-1.7B-ASHQ1-GGUF
• 📦 Mellum2.1-12B-A2.5B-Thinking-MERNIK-GGUF
• 📊 MERNIK-Fracture — the labels: KLD-only, 5-column, reasoning-corpus damage (the origin of L2/L3)
• 📊 MERNIK-rlmini-kld — early KLD labels
• 📊 MERNIK-gnom-labels — legacy PPL-era labels (retired prototype)

Lineage: Apache-2.0. Built with Soulfate24, whose KLD battery ended our PPL theater. Field journals with every scar: FUSION.md (monsters), README-ZOO.md (utility duels), SAGA.md (MTP graft), LEGACY.md (archived modes and removed paths), DIARY.md.

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