docs: run-004 reproduced the retracted verdict on the mojibake snapshot

Identical-to-4-decimals (83.0797 vs 83.08) + live mojibake decode of
best/ = same poisoned data, not a capacity result. run-005 is the real
clean-label test.

Author: Ronald Tse

docs/PUBLICATION-NOTES.md

@@ -103,3 +103,16 @@ stack. The frontier law (pretrained-or-collapse) and the controlled
 capacity/aux/optimizer experiments give it empirical heft. Package as
 one paper (current paper.adoc); the margin/head finding alone is also
 a strong short workshop paper if a split is ever wanted.
+
+## ara-diac-tiny: the "clean-label re-run" wasn't (2026-08-29)
+
+Narrative caution for the paper: the Aug-24 retraction flagged that the
+83.08 tiny-collapse number was measured on mojibake labels. The
+attempted clean re-run (run-004) silently reused the same Aug-23
+snapshot via a baked-in `labels_file` path — and reproduced 83.0797
+exactly, which is itself the tell: identical-to-4-decimals means same
+data, not same capacity law. Two lessons for the experiments section:
+(1) label-provenance must be content-hashed into the run record, not
+inferred from filenames; (2) a reproduced number is only evidence of
+reproducibility when the input pipeline is versioned. run-005
+(regenerating labels live from the r6 teacher) is the honest test.

docs/RESULTS.md

@@ -177,6 +177,24 @@ conclusion for Arabic is UNPROVEN pending a clean-label re-run. The
 Thai tiny verdict is unaffected (umt5/sentencepiece labels were
 byte-exact); the pretrained-backbone law rests on Thai evidence.
 
+## ara-diac-tiny run-004 — the retracted verdict reproduced, on poisoned data (2026-08-29)
+
+The spec intended to rerun the tiny tier on clean labels silently
+consumed the Aug-23 label snapshot (pre `decode_joined` fix). Evidence
+chain:
+
+- run-004/best decodes `كتاب` as `ÙÙاتÙب` — UTF-8-as-Latin1 mojibake,
+  the exact label corruption the retraction describes
+- the 300-paragraph windowed gate (n=300, teacher reproduces its
+  documented 1.3205) scores the student **83.0797** vs the retracted
+  **83.08** — identical to four decimals: the poisoned-data constant,
+  not a capacity result
+- `final_eval.json` in the run dir is the durable provenance
+
+Verdict: run-004 says nothing about from-scratch capacity; the
+retraction stands. **run-005** (fresh teacher labels, no snapshot,
+2026-08-29) is the actual clean-label falsification test — in flight.
+
 ## ara-diac-small-1.0 — Arabic client tier (2026-08-24)
 
 Sequence-level KD from the r6 teacher (rababa_arabic_byt5/run-006-morph,