REVISION_NOTE.md — BABEL paper v1 → v1.1 (tracked-change summary)

Date: 2026-07-08 · By: REVISION CC · Governing brief: REVISION_BRIEF_2026-07-07.md (STAGE 1) · External input: STANFORD_REVIEW.md (paperreview.ai, 2026-07-07). Scope: Stage 1 only — reanalysis of existing frozen artifacts + text. No new GPU experiments (those are proposals in STAGE2_PROPOSAL.md; Will greenlights each). Nothing publishes — PAPER_V1_1_DRAFT.md stays a draft until Will fires the Zenodo-v2 / GitHub update. No frozen number was altered and no artifact was renamed; every added statistic is a new reanalysis of frozen data, pre-registered where required and logged propose-only in the pen.

Source of the revised draft: PAPER_V1_1_DRAFT.md (byte-copy of PAPER_DRAFT_V1.md, then the edits below). Reanalysis harnesses + outputs: _rev_fdr.py/_rev_fdr.out, _rev_fdr_channel.py/_rev_fdr_channel.out, _rev_floor.py/_rev_floor.out. Pen blocks (all propose-only): REVISION-FDR — PRE-REGISTRATION, REVISION-FDR — RESULTS, REVISION-FLOOR — RESULTS (2026-07-08).

A. Substantive reanalyses (Stage 1A)

1. FDR / FWER control on the naming battery (review Q2 — top priority)

Pre-registered before computing (pen REVISION-FDR — PRE-REGISTRATION, locked α = 0.05 BH, sensitivity 0.01/0.10, tail-model + re-derivation rule) — brief item 1 satisfied.
Validation gate passed: re-deriving NAMED from the raw stored statistics with the frozen obs > null95 rule reproduces the frozen L1 verdicts 0 mismatches / 312 → the BH re-derivation is trustworthy.
Result (312 channels with frozen per-gate stats; frozen NAMED 149 = 47.8 %): per-gate BH q = 0.05 → 6.7 % named (q = 0.01 → 1.9 %, q = 0.10 → 16.3 %); channel-level (conjunction-aware, post-hoc) BH q = 0.05 → 25.6 % (q = 0.01 → 9.0 %, q = 0.10 → 35.6 %); Holm FWER → 1 channel; global-null assumption-free bound → FDP ≈ 10 %. N = 20 nulls floor the empirical p at ≈ 0.048 → continuous p are tail-model extrapolations; a definitive FDR is a Stage-2 high-N re-draw.
Draft changes: Abstract naming sentence re-scoped + corrected fractions; new §6.1 multiplicity paragraph + table; §6.5 number 3 re-scoped; new Appendix B (full procedure, both null models, Holm, global-null, scope). The 53.6 %/46.4 % figures are retained as the frozen gate-level record and everywhere re-labelled "under the L1 σ-null battery at N = 20".

2. Floor-construction sensitivity for the 39/39 closure (review Q1)

Result: 36/39 legacy closure is floor-construction-robust; 39/39 is reached only at the full norm-relative recalibration (β = 1) — β ≤ 0.5 → 36/39, β = 0.75 → 37/39. The three recal-only cells (code_b12, rep_b11, rep_b12) close because the norm-scaled floor there is 1.5–2.7× the legacy floor (tracks ρ²) — documented norm-geometry, meter-dependent, labelled so. Recal closure tolerates loosening (39/39 for c ≥ 1) but is sensitive to a 10 % tightening (34/39 at c = 0.9); 13/39 cells pass "tight" (KL/floor 0.8–1.0).
Honest gap: per-token substitution KL is not frozen (only per-cell means) → the bootstrap-CI-vs-floor half of Q1 is not computable CPU-only; deferred to Stage 2.
Draft changes: Abstract 39/39 clause scoped; new §4.1 floor-sensitivity paragraph; §8.5 sensitivity note; new Appendix C (β-sweep, interpolation, multiplier, margin bands, the 3 gap cells, the CI constraint).

3. Student (executable-rung) methods appendix (review Q6)

Extracted every training/val detail from _v6_result.json/_v7_result.json/_v6.py/_v7.py, all numbers verified against the frozen JSON.
Key clarification for the reviewer: the linear student is Adam-MSE (lr = 1e-3, 4000 steps), with NO ridge / weight decay — its regularizer is capacity, not a penalty. Splits: 96 train periods (seeds 7000–7095), 16 SACRED (seed 3, never-seen), 16 HOLD2 (8000–8015), period 64. Twin = permuted rep-era targets; pass = real ≤ 0.5 × twin.
Draft change: new Appendix D (task/inputs, data/splits, fit, architectures/params, twin, full results table, non-recoverable list).

4. No-gloss scope reframe (review Q7)

Draft change: §8.4 rewritten — every "word-less" claim now means no gloss under the CH-WU/CH-INT/CH-FIELD battery at N = 20, not "provably carries no content"; named battery extensions listed as future work (syntax/dependency probes, morphology, non-vocabulary probes, causal-scrubbing readouts, SAE decoders; §9). Two bounding facts stated: the FDR re-analysis shows the battery is if anything generous (so no-gloss is more likely an under- than over-estimate), and L6's dark-complement edge (2/8 faint) shows the honest limit.

B. Text changes (Stage 1B)

5. Scope (title/abstract). Title keeps "State Space" (unchanged). Abstract sentence 2 adds an explicit boundary-grain / within-block scope line; §1.4 already carried it (unchanged).
6. Glossary. New §1.5 — one-page neologism table (door, seam, meter, floor, folded read, dark mass, corridor, core, rung, gloss, no-gloss, transplant, gauge/lever, twin, DEAF axis, …).
7. Related work. New §7 paragraph adding causal scrubbing (Chan et al., AF 2022), DLA / attribution patching (2310.10348) / ACDC (2304.14997), and mechanistic benchmarks (Tracr 2301.05062, RAVEL Huang 2024), each mapped to the Table-1 four axes where honest. (SAE decoding and probing debates were already in §7; unchanged.)
8. Artifacts (Q8). Every "pending release" replaced with the live release: Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21230108 (concept 10.5281/zenodo.21230107), github.com/wpferrell/babel-codec-gpt2, huggingface.co/wpferrell/babel-codec-gpt2 — header line, §7 falsifiability line ([GITHUB-URL]), and §10 artifact statement.

C. Editor notes / NOTES-for-Will

New NOTES-for-Will item 12 added to the draft's review-comment block (delete before release).
New §7 citations need the same live-page verification as the existing ones before release: causal scrubbing (Alignment Forum, no arXiv), attribution patching (2310.10348), ACDC (2304.14997), Tracr (2301.05062), RAVEL (Huang et al., 2024 — exact ID to confirm).

D. What did NOT change

No frozen result, floor, hash, or artifact name. The L5/L6 certified negatives, the 39/39 recal headline, the seam law, the transplant 94.7 %, and the wall student all stand. The revision scopes and stress-tests the naming and closure claims; it does not move them.

E. Deliverables produced

PAPER_V1_1_DRAFT.md · REVISION_NOTE.md (this) · REVIEWER_RESPONSE.md · STAGE2_PROPOSAL.md · reanalysis harnesses/outputs (_rev_fdr*.py/.out, _rev_floor.py/.out) · pen propose-only blocks.

F. Stage-2 GPU experiments — folded 2026-07-08 (Stage-2 Revision CC)

Will greenlit three Stage-2 items (STAGE2_GREENLIGHT.md); all three ran, each with a byte-replay gate to the frozen number and pre-registered bands (pen: STAGE2-A/B/C blocks). Results folded into the draft and REVIEWER_RESPONSE; frozen artifacts untouched (READ-ONLY); propose-only; nothing published.

Item B — transplant boundary×regime (Q4; _s2b.py). Gate: b6/prose 16-pair closure = 0.9467 (dev 0.0). 3×3 grid (b2/b6/b10 × prose/code/repetition), 32 pairs/cell, matched-random null, 10k bootstrap CIs. Result: boundary- and prose/repetition-general (median closure 0.82–0.98 across depth); code heavy-tailed at early/mid depth (median 0.70/0.60, mean collapsed by outlier pairs), clean at b10 (0.89). → Abstract + §6.4 table + §8 item 9 scoped; Reviewer Q4 answered.
Item C — seam perturbation (Q5; _s2c.py). Gate: global-core cert byte-replays all 36 frozen KL_LIN (max dev 0.0). C2a within-span rotation exactly invariant; C2b ±ε jitter 30/30 draws keep 36/36 TIGHT (ε≤0.10); C1 independent per-seam re-derivation keeps 33/36 LINEAR-TIGHT — the 3 failures are all the embed→L0 rewrite seam (prose/code LINEAR-not-TIGHT, repetition BROKEN). → §6.2 amended: the linear composition law is a robust model property at the 33 propagation seams, field-conditioned at the b0 rewrite seam. Reviewer Q5 answered.
Item A — door/core rotation robustness (Q3; _s2a.py). Gate: S4 readable + full rank-48 fold KL byte-replay all 4 sampled cells (dev 0.0). Across R=20 random orthonormal bases/object: folded-read reconstruction KL invariant to 0.0, k* shift 0 (k*=16/40/32/24), 0/80 pass-flips, door/core footprints invariant to ≤3e-5, matched-random reconstruction discriminator separates. Core-field per-axis identities drift under within-span rotation (0/19) → verdict PARTIAL: necessity/k*/folded-reads rotation-stable, the 19 field labels a privileged basis of an intrinsic subspace. → §6.1 note added; §8 item 9; Reviewer Q3 answered.

Harnesses/outputs: _s2b.py/_s2b_result.json, _s2c.py/_s2c_result.json, _s2a.py/_s2a_result.json, logs _s2{a,b,c}.log, launch bats _s2{a,b,c}_run.bat; pen propose-only pre-registration + results blocks (STAGE2-A/B/C). None moves a frozen headline; each scopes a claim, per the pre-registered kill branches. DATALAKE registered at closeout. NOTHING published — v1.1 stays draft until Will fires Zenodo v2 / GitHub.