The advisor's "runtime five-stage state machine + per-stage reference poses + RL residual" appeared in none of the three papers it cited - reading the originals changed the plan and downgraded two widely repeated industry claims

Symptom

After the violent first real run, an advisor proposed re-architecting recovery as a runtime staged state machine with reference poses and an RL residual, citing HoST, HumanUP and StableMimic.

Context

The three papers were read in full on 2026-08-09 and tabulated (deployment form, what the "stages" really are, hard constraints, references). HoST: one end-to-end policy, height-gated rewards in training, action anchored as q + beta*a with a beta curriculum. HumanUP: two training stages with the same observation/action; the vendor's three-stage state machine is the baseline it beats (41.7% vs 78.3%); Stage II tracks an 8x slowed Stage I trajectory (4x too violent, 10x does not converge). StableMimic: a learned soft gate. On 08-10 more sources were checked the same way: the Agility page does not say Digit's self-righting was learned in simulation (only step recovery is stated as RL), so the claim was downgraded to speculation; HoST's support for the 12-DoF armless Mini Pi exists in its code repository, not in the paper text.

Change

Adopted only what the originals share: a hard action bound or anchored action space, strong smoothing including a second-difference term, a slowed hidden reference, heavy DR and real fallen states. The staged runtime state machine was not adopted.

Outcome

The next re-rooting candidates came straight from the verified material, and the beta-anchored action space (HoST, with the Mini Pi configuration as the nearest real-robot precedent) became V2, the lineage that later stood up on hardware.

Mechanism

A paraphrase compresses a paper into the advisor's own architecture; only the original shows what was actually deployed, what was a baseline, and which numbers came with which ablation.

Applies when

• an advisor, agent or summary proposes an architecture with citations
• an industry claim ("X learned it in sim") is about to justify a design
• several papers are cited for one combined recipe