The Ladder

All rungs, all evidence

Filter by status. Click a card to see allowed transformations, kill thresholds, the empirical probe, and Lean backing.

Historical Rungs

Earlier ladder iterations

The ladder evolved as we deepened. These rungs were retired or reframed; their impact is recorded on the parent monorepo as a metric, and they are preserved here for methodological continuity.

G_1.0 RECLASSIFIED

Bounded non-orthogonal gauge (spectrum-reshape diagnostic)

Retired: 2026-04-26-breadth-first-handoff

Eckart-Young invariance: a learned gauge cannot improve rank-r reconstruction error. Mechanism is rotation-only (zero-cost), subsumed by SRHT. The proper byte-counted G₁.0' round-trip ran 2026-04-27 r1–r2; r2 killed: optimization adds < 3% over zero-cost orthogonal random.

Impact metric: Spectrum reshape (52–87% Frobenius reduction), but NOT compression-grade per Gate 1 (Bytes); subsumed into Paper 1 RotorQuant narrative.

Related: R1 (RotorQuant on OLMoE experts; SRHT rotation as a proven mechanism)

ladder-pivot-v2 REFRAMED

Mechanism-rungs → impact-rungs reframe (G_x → R_x)

Retired: 2026-04-27

The G-rung ladder asks 'is this mechanism real?'. The R-rung ladder asks 'does this bend the byte budget?'. Distinguishing the two prevented confusing dead-mechanism G_1.0 (learned gauge) with live-engineering R1 (RotorQuant), even though they share the rotation primitive.

Impact metric: Methodological: separated the falsification ladder (scientific axis) from the deployment ladder (engineering axis).

Related: R1–R7 (deployment-axis rungs tracked in the parent monorepo)

Current rungs (breadth-first sweep)

G0

Orthogonal/permutation Tucker gauge

Free orthogonal regauge

KILLED
G1

Bounded non-orthogonal gauges

Reclassified — spectrum diagnostic only

RECLASSIFIED
G2

Cross-mode reshaping

Free Tucker on layer × expert × hidden

KILLED
G3

Routed effective weights

Per-route weight aggregation

CONSTRUCTIVE
G4

Route/task-conditional circuits

Task-conditional rank reduction

OPEN
G5

Linear-feature causal circuits

LRH-implied compression

KILLED
G6

Router unary low-rank

Single-router rank reduction

KILLED
G7

Pair/hot-set co-occurrence

Pairwise router certificate (gated)

OPEN

Comparison table

Rung Name Status Key evidence
G0 Free orthogonal regauge KILLED r_eff ≥ 9 (layer), ≥ 32 (expert); residual ≥ 88.9% / 96.9%
G1 Reclassified — spectrum diagnostic only RECLASSIFIED Spectrum-reshape diagnostic only; G₁.0’ (quantize round-trip) open
G2 Free Tucker on layer × expert × hidden KILLED r_eff ≥ 256; worst observed 262.773; residual ≥ 99.6%
G3 Per-route weight aggregation CONSTRUCTIVE MODEST CONSTRUCTIVE — r_eff_eff min = 3.89, mean ≈ 5.6; q≈16–32 captures 58–80% energy
G4 Task-conditional rank reduction OPEN UNIFORM KILLED; TASK-CONDITIONAL OPEN — r2: 8/12 kill; r3: 9/12 kill
G5 LRH-implied compression KILLED KILLED AT LRH PROXY — 13/16 layers LRH_IMPLAUSIBLE_AFTER_DEFLATION
G6 Single-router rank reduction KILLED Route-flip rate above tolerance at all ranks
G7 Pairwise router certificate (gated) OPEN HOT_SET_DISPENSED — C_pair r_eff=4.64, 153 dominant pairs; top-100 coverage 0.72 < 0.95 threshold