SSM-AI – Appendix E — Vendor Bake-off Protocol (E7–E9)

Edge guards, a one-page report template, and acceptance checks.

E7) Edge cases & guardrails

# Mismatched candidate counts
Aggregate at the decision level (per item). If per-request pairing is required,
first pool within each request in u-space, then pool across requests.

# Missing telemetry for gate
Set g := 1 and flag the row; still log RSI and band.

# Vendor-specific truncation or calibration
Do not normalize RSI post-hoc. Comparability comes from (-1,+1) bounds.

# Shard merges
Only merge (U,W). Never average RSI directly.

# Fallback on breach
If acceptance gates fail (parity, order invariance, clamp bounds, gate purity),
revert analysis to classical m-based baselines for that slice and flag the bucket.

# Numeric hygiene
Always clamp before atanh. Carry (U,W) as float64. Guard denominators with max(W, eps_w).

E8) Report template (per bucket)

bucket          RSI_pool_env   95% CI (u-space)   A++/A+/A0/A-/A--   tokens   lat_ms
Vendor A        0.510478       [+0.08, +0.21]     0/1/2/0/0          0.92x    310
Vendor B        0.393545       [ 0.00,  0.00]     0/1/2/0/0          1.00x    345

# Verdict line (bounded index)
ΔRSI ≈ +0.116933 in favor of A, significant (p ≈ 0.03) computed in u-space
(mean(atanh(RSI_env_A)) - mean(atanh(RSI_env_B)) with bootstrap).

E9) Acceptance checklist (pass/fail)

Determinism          Same manifest + inputs ⇒ identical RSI_pool and RSI_pool_env
Order/shard          Permutations and shard merges leave pools unchanged (U/W fuse)
Boundedness          All RSI, RSI_env in (-1,+1); pooled results too
Stamp completeness   Each bucket summary includes knobs_hash
No mutation of m     Verified by collapse parity: phi((m,a)) = m

One-line takeaway. Publish a stamped, one-page bake-off per surface: bounded chooser, u-space pooling, CI in rapidity space — order-invariant, shard-safe, reproducible, and classical values remain untouched via phi((m,a)) = m.


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