Training Coach

Doctrine

A report may cite any of these as doctrine-N.

1. doctrine-1Contract freeze and fingerprint discipline

   The policy I/O contract (observation layout, scales, history semantics, action pipeline) is frozen and fingerprinted; every exported policy is stamped and verified; contract changes ship as new versioned profiles that leave old artifacts bit-identical, and old policies run forever under their era's pinned profile.

   Case. The 215-dim omni contract was frozen with a three-machine digest; the one contract-level extension (lateral feed-forward) went in as a new `omni_ff` profile with the old profile provably untouched, and the contract checker caught two real wiring bugs before any training (`contract-freeze-and-checker`). A silently changed gait-clock default would have fed old policies a 25% slower clock - closed by pinned legacy profiles (`legacy-profile-pinning`). A stale derived USD forked plant mass 2.2% until an automated source-vs-derived instrument gated it (`derived-asset-staleness-check`). A gain profile is part of the closed loop a policy was trained in and belongs in its stamp; the recovery line's anchored authority was left out of its manifest and recorded as the gap not to repeat (`gain-profile-belongs-in-the-stamp`), and a second policy behind a deploy-side switch made the handoff state itself a contract (`recovery-two-policies-and-a-state-machine`, `walk-recovery-fsm-handoff`).

   Coach application. On any proposal touching obs/action semantics, defaults, or derived assets: demand the version/profile plan, the fingerprint update, and the checker extension in the same change; flag any old artifact that would run under new defaults.

   contract-freeze-and-checkerlegacy-profile-pinningderived-asset-staleness-checkgain-profile-belongs-in-the-stamprecovery-two-policies-and-a-state-machinewalk-recovery-fsm-handoff

2. doctrine-2Attribution by resolved training params - never eval-override knobs

   Capability differences between lineages are explained only by digging each lineage's *resolved* training configuration and eliminating columns; evaluation-side override knobs (kd-scale, power-scale, cycle-time) act on the plant for *every* policy and may serve as deployment mitigations but never as explanations.

   Case. Low-friction robustness across 8 lineages x 3840 cells was traced to kd DR *bandwidth* - every lineage had ground friction pinned to (1.0,1.0), so "trained friction" could not be the axis; the parameter axis and the plant axis were explicitly separated after the first attribution conflated them (`kd-bandwidth-mu-law-attribution`). "Weak turning" on hardware was a power-scale plant effect, not a training gap (`deploy-knob-attribution-before-retraining`); slowing the deploy clock was out-of-distribution, not a feature (`cycle-time-override-is-ood`). The ground truth for what a run trained under is the logged per-run config, not the source tree (`resolved-config-is-source-of-truth`).

   Coach application. Whenever asked "why is lineage A better", require the resolved-param table first; kill zero-variance columns; refuse explanations phrased in eval-knob terms; when a knob helps, label it deployment mitigation.

   kd-bandwidth-mu-law-attributiondeploy-knob-attribution-before-retrainingcycle-time-override-is-oodresolved-config-is-source-of-truth

3. doctrine-3PASS gates become constraints; FAIL gates become objectives

   Once a skill passes its gate, that gate converts into a standing regression constraint (budget <= 2/20 against the parent baseline) for all later training; gates currently failing are the only legitimate objectives of the next rung.

   Case. The C ladder ran one frozen 13-cell x 20-seed matrix at every rung with promotion = "new skill PASS and old skills within regression budget"; C1 was stopped and re-rooted precisely because it trained away the root's backward PASS (`fixed-acceptance-matrix-per-rung`, `preregistered-stop-criteria-per-rung`). The C4 product shipped only at 260/260 cells with zero regression.

   Coach application. Keep the ledger: every PASS adds a constraint row; propose rungs only against FAIL rows; treat any constraint violation as stop-and-attribute, never "the next rung might win it back".

   fixed-acceptance-matrix-per-rungpreregistered-stop-criteria-per-rung

4. doctrine-4One variable per ladder rung - counted against what the checkpoint saw

   A rung changes one variable, where "one" is counted against the checkpoint's actual training state, not against the current config's diff; batching is allowed only when each change owns a disjoint symptom space with a pre-registered ablation order.

   Case. Two rungs failed identically because resuming s1e-500 under the evolved config silently added four plant variables the checkpoint had never seen ("单变量纪律不只看「我改了什么」,还要看「checkpoint 见过什么」" - `resume-state-dr-audit`). v8 legally batched four orthogonal fixes with a written ablation order (`orthogonal-batch-with-ablation-order`); v9 spent one run completing a 2x2 factorial so either outcome convicted a factor (`fill-the-missing-factorial-cell`); v10b's three-way ablation wrongfully convicted the clock and had to be retried fairly.

   Coach application. Before any resume: diff cfg against the checkpoint's logged training state. Before any batch: require the symptom-ownership map and ablation order in writing.

   resume-state-dr-auditorthogonal-batch-with-ablation-orderfill-the-missing-factorial-cell

5. doctrine-5Pre-register risks, readings, and stop criteria before the ladder

   Before a ladder or risky rung, write down the known risks, the interpretation of every plausible outcome, and hit-any-one stop criteria - frozen before training, tightened when priors say results should come fast.

   Case. The C ladder opened with three numbered risks including the exact falsification condition for its own root choice; A/B arms carried "预注册读法(事后不改)" tables; a level expected to fail was run anyway for its pre-registered diagnostic value (`preregister-risks-and-fork-readings`). Stop criteria caught C4-redo rungs at +200 instead of full caps (`preregistered-stop-criteria-per-rung`); hardware sessions pre-registered per-config expected signatures and the disagreement rule "不改结论改账" (`preregistered-real-expectations`, `feasibility-accounts-lock-design-point`).

   Coach application. Refuse to open a rung without the written risk/reading/ stop block; after results, read conclusions off the pre-registered table and flag any post-hoc reinterpretation.

   preregister-risks-and-fork-readingspreregistered-stop-criteria-per-rungpreregistered-real-expectationsfeasibility-accounts-lock-design-point

6. doctrine-6Plant parameters are measured, never invented

   Every plant number carries measurement provenance: armature = N^2 x rotor inertia from no-load tests, friction split by rig and by API column, torque limits shaped by per-joint gait peaks, latency traced through the real pipeline, masses weighed - and DR bands are additive around the measured nominal, sized to the measured dispersion.

   Case. Guessed friction was 2.5x low and guessed damping 5x high (`friction-measured-not-guessed`); armature had been 0 with a 9:1 gearbox (81x reflected inertia, `armature-n2-rotor-inertia`); a uniform torque derating was "the wrong shape" vs measured peaks (`torque-limit-shape-by-measured-peaks`); the delay implementation itself was a wrong plant for a whole lineage (`latency-lerp-reverse-extrapolation`); the run design point was locked by three accounts including the tau_limit/kd speed ceiling (`feasibility-accounts-lock-design-point`); identified friction had to land in the right simulator API columns to act at all (`sim-api-friction-columns`). The recovery and one-leg lines opened with the same kind of accounts before any reward existed - a connected static path and the torque along it for an armless get-up, and the gains single support needs to be holdable at all (`get-up-feasibility-accounts-before-training`, `single-support-gain-authority-probe`).

   Coach application. For any plant value in a config review, ask "measured how?"; reject absolute ranges with no nominal; check API column mapping and derived-asset regeneration whenever measured values land.

   friction-measured-not-guessedarmature-n2-rotor-inertiatorque-limit-shape-by-measured-peakslatency-lerp-reverse-extrapolationfeasibility-accounts-lock-design-pointsim-api-friction-columnsget-up-feasibility-accounts-before-trainingsingle-support-gain-authority-probe

7. doctrine-7Sim2sim gate before sim2real - under deployment conditions

   Every checkpoint passes a second, independently built simulator before hardware, and both the gate and the smoke loop run under the measured deployment conditions (real pipeline delay, honest contact parameters, the deployment gain/power profile).

   Case. The standing order "先sim2sim 再sim2real" (`sim2sim-gate-before-sim2real`); acceptance flipped to match hardware only under measured condim/torsional friction (`eval-plant-honesty-contact-params`); gates moved permanently to `--delay 2` after the kicking incident (`pipeline-latency-is-plant-not-dr`); and the harness itself must be audited - a frame-convention bug in the cross-sim evaluator invalidated a whole line of verdicts (`body-frame-velocity-api-audit`). The recovery line's second simulator caught a torque penalty paid for by bracing the legs together (`torque-penalty-bought-by-leg-bracing`), and a 1.8x torque disagreement between the two plants stayed binding because its one surviving explanation was never tested (`torque-disagreement-between-simulators-unresolved`).

   Coach application. Block any hardware request lacking a second-sim PASS at deployment conditions; when sim2sim and training-side metrics disagree, treat the evaluator as a suspect too.

   sim2sim-gate-before-sim2realeval-plant-honesty-contact-paramspipeline-latency-is-plant-not-drbody-frame-velocity-api-audittorque-penalty-bought-by-leg-bracingtorque-disagreement-between-simulators-unresolved

8. doctrine-8Observation honesty - the actor's inputs are a hardware contract

   The actor observes only signals the real robot produces with realistic noise; privileged truths go to the critic; history windows are estimators and must train under plant variation; rewards on quantities the actor cannot observe buy only average suppression, never closed-loop correction.

   Case. Ground-truth velocity/forces went critic-only (`observation-honesty-critic-only`); frame_hist under zero DR memorized the trainer's plant fingerprint - 0/20 transfer (`history-obs-needs-plant-variation`); world-frame yaw rewards could not teach pull-back because heading is unobservable to the actor - correction was routed to the deploy outer loop instead of breaking the contract (`reward-observability-limit`, `deploy-heading-loop-and-align-training`).

   Coach application. Audit every actor-obs element for hardware existence; require minimal plant jitter whenever history/recurrence exists; for each reward, ask "can the actor see this error?" and route correction tasks to outer loops.

   observation-honesty-critic-onlyhistory-obs-needs-plant-variationreward-observability-limitdeploy-heading-loop-and-align-training

9. doctrine-9Reward economics are audited in realized currency

   Reward design decisions are made on realized per-step magnitudes under the actual policy and command distribution: price the do-nothing optimum before adding a mode, compare achieved values to the computed ignore-floor, calibrate thresholds between measured healthy and sick distributions, and ship every new penalty with a withdrawal clause.

   Case. feet_air_time at weight 2.0 realized 0.038 vs tracking 1.2 - drag was rational (`realized-contribution-audit`); ignoring a vy command cost 28-180x less than ignoring vx until a gated tracking term was added (`reward-cost-of-ignoring-audit`, `gate-new-reward-terms-by-command`); achieved-vs-floor separated "never learned" from "priced out" (`ignore-floor-diagnosis`); the foot-distance wall was placed between measured healthy (0.6% tax) and sick (55%) policies (`calibrate-threshold-between-healthy-and-sick`); the landing penalty carried a pre-registered stand-down condition and actually stood down (`calibration-threshold-with-withdrawal-clause`); two clearance terms were inert until zero-points and gate occupancy were checked (`inert-reward-term-audit`). A get-up policy sat because three gated terms paid the seated pose 84% of the return and the one term that could tell sitting from standing was an exp kernel reading 4.6e-5 at the real error (`seated-basin-dead-exp-kernel`); a torque-tail term was weighted by its measured steady value beside a peer term after the estimate proved 12x off (`tail-torque-needs-hinge-on-computed-demand`).

   Coach application. Never discuss weights in the abstract: demand the realized-contribution table, the ignore-floor number, and the healthy-pay calibration before any reward edit is approved.

   realized-contribution-auditreward-cost-of-ignoring-auditgate-new-reward-terms-by-commandignore-floor-diagnosiscalibrate-threshold-between-healthy-and-sickcalibration-threshold-with-withdrawal-clauseinert-reward-term-auditseated-basin-dead-exp-kerneltail-torque-needs-hinge-on-computed-demand

10. doctrine-10The zero-cost option must be the desired behavior

    For every penalty, name what the zero-cost option is; penalize failure events (slip, saturation excess, contact in flight windows), never the motion or joints that healthy behavior uses; make degenerate strategies fatal via termination where penalties cannot price them out.

    Case. Joint-usage penalties for drift taxed a 1.4%-of-momentum channel 2.7/step and collapsed training; the slip penalty costs a non-slipping gait exactly zero (`penalize-the-slip-not-the-joint`). A frozen-at-clamp joint pays zero action-rate forever - only a pre-clip saturation penalty flips the cheat economics (`saturation-cheating-zero-rate-cost`). Ungated phase shaping made standing 42x more expensive than stepping and cooked the hip motors (`moving-gate-42x-stand-tax`); crouch-shuffling lived until a height termination deleted it (`termination-closes-degenerate-basin`). A gated penalty is an exit: the policy parked just outside an uprightness gate, then just under a height gate, to stop paying a stance tax, and only a positive band plus an always-on guard closed both (`penalty-gate-is-an-escape-hatch`); a soft-limit penalty that charged the standing pose itself bought a 4.1 deg lean (`soft-limit-penalty-charges-nominal-pose`); an unpriced foot attitude was spent on edge-standing (`unpriced-foot-attitude-is-a-free-variable`); and the one-leg line listed its cheapest cheats before training and still met one through a zero-gradient band (`enumerate-cheapest-cheats-before-training`, `binary-band-reward-fake-touchdown`).

    Coach application. Run the "零代价的选项是什么" audit on every proposed term; convert motion taxes into event-conditional penalties; check the termination set against each known degenerate strategy.

    penalize-the-slip-not-the-jointsaturation-cheating-zero-rate-costmoving-gate-42x-stand-taxtermination-closes-degenerate-basinpenalty-gate-is-an-escape-hatchsoft-limit-penalty-charges-nominal-poseunpriced-foot-attitude-is-a-free-variableenumerate-cheapest-cheats-before-trainingbinary-band-reward-fake-touchdown

11. doctrine-11Measurement discipline: independent referees, signs, distributions

    A disputed measurement is adjudicated only by an independent algorithm from raw state; directional ability requires sign-antisymmetry under command reversal; bimodal metrics are reported as mode shares (never medians, never 3 seeds); ratios are not comparable when totals change; reward values compare only within one command distribution; single chaotic events never cross machines.

    Case. The triple reversal - a good metric was "refuted" by a sibling metric that shared the disease (`independent-referee-for-metric-disputes`, `body-frame-velocity-api-audit`); same-signed +/- responses were bias, not turning (`same-sign-response-is-yaw-bias`); the swing median sat in a bimodal gap (`median-hides-bimodal-distribution`); "v6 is jitterier" died on absolute energies (`ratio-metrics-need-absolute-check`); yaw gain measured 15x wrong in an oscillating frame (`heading-integral-not-body-rate`); a 44% improvement evaporated under same-distribution comparison (`same-distribution-reward-comparison`); drift direction was a limit cycle (`multiseed-sign-test-for-drift`); a cross-machine push cliff was chaos (`single-impulse-recovery-is-chaotic`).

    Coach application. Before accepting any surprising number: ask for the independent recomputation, the sign pair, the distribution shape, and the comparison conditions. Retract in writing when a metric falls.

    independent-referee-for-metric-disputesbody-frame-velocity-api-auditsame-sign-response-is-yaw-biasmedian-hides-bimodal-distributionratio-metrics-need-absolute-checkheading-integral-not-body-ratesame-distribution-reward-comparisonmultiseed-sign-test-for-driftsingle-impulse-recovery-is-chaotic

12. doctrine-12The deployment pipeline is plant

    Irreducible pipeline properties - action latency, rate limits, power/torque scaling, teleop command mappings - are part of the nominal plant, modeled from day one and reproduced in every gate; deploy-side scalings are crutches that flag unmodeled plant, and they cannot be algebraically folded into training constants.

    Case. Right-leg kicking was over-trained-delay x loop gain; power 0.8 was a gain-reduction crutch that retired when the delay was modeled (`pipeline-latency-is-plant-not-dr`); power derating damages non-forward axes first (`power-scale-hurts-nonforward-axes`); training at 0.4 scale as the "twin" of deploying 0.5 x 0.8 collapsed 0/20 (`deploy-scaling-not-training-equivalent`); one shared teleop speed sent an out-of-band lateral command and the robot clipped its own foot (`teleop-command-band-per-axis`); the latency DR range had not even covered the measured pipeline (`latency-dr-covers-measured-pipeline`). A rate limiter added at deployment only clipped a policy that kept commanding (`deploy-rate-limiter-windup`); moved into training and anchored on the last command it became an integrator in the balance loop (`slew-anchor-is-an-integrator`); anchored on the measured angle it bounded torque and kept the bandwidth (`beta-anchored-action-target`). The walking lines' safe setting, power-scale 0.8, cut the ends of the recovery policy's full-range travel and left its spikes alone; a gain inside the trained band did the job (`power-derating-cuts-full-range-contract`).

    Coach application. Demand the measured pipeline latency/limits in the plant model and in gate conditions; treat every deploy-side derating as a question ("what is this compensating?"); block per-axis command sources that exceed training bands.

    pipeline-latency-is-plant-not-drpower-scale-hurts-nonforward-axesdeploy-scaling-not-training-equivalentteleop-command-band-per-axislatency-dr-covers-measured-pipelinedeploy-rate-limiter-windupslew-anchor-is-an-integratorbeta-anchored-action-targetpower-derating-cuts-full-range-contract

13. doctrine-13DR budget is finite; its distribution is the measured support

    Robustness is a conserved budget: disturbance training on an already-hardened lineage borrows from existing margins; DR ranges span the measured deployment support - no fictitious tails (they buy degenerate gaits), no single constants (they allow thin-margin specialization); harden the plant only after the task distribution is final.

    Case. The same push dose helped a narrow lineage and damaged a balanced one - budget conservation (`push-dr-conditional-budget-conservation`); wide latency tails bought drag-glide, constant values shipped 60% thinner tilt margins - the answer is a narrow band on the measured support (`dr-tail-plant-continuation`, `constant-value-dr-overfits-margin`); task-first ordering because hardening a soon-to-change task wastes budget (`task-shaping-before-plant-hardening`); COM randomization used deliberately as a behavior-shaping tool, and rolled back on symptom per its own contract (`com-randomization-forces-leg-spread`, `com-dr-rollback-on-symptom`). DR that is switched on can still be thin: the run policy fell in the frontal plane its gain-and-latency randomization never touched (`thin-dr-judged-by-channel-coverage`), and a friction priority settled under one action contract had to be re-measured under the next (`friction-priority-re-measured-after-plant-change`).

    Coach application. Before any DR rung: check the untrained policy against the spec, the lineage's current DR load, and the measured real-world range; after it: audit retained margins, not just the new tolerance.

    push-dr-conditional-budget-conservationdr-tail-plant-continuationconstant-value-dr-overfits-margintask-shaping-before-plant-hardeningcom-randomization-forces-leg-spreadcom-dr-rollback-on-symptomthin-dr-judged-by-channel-coveragefriction-priority-re-measured-after-plant-change

14. doctrine-14Gates measure what hardware feels: posture, margins, stripped assists

    Acceptance batteries carry posture-class rows (tilt max median, per-joint L/R asymmetry, temperature) beside task rows, graded margin columns beside binary gates, chirality scored per side, at least one condition that removes the environment's free stabilization, and validated predictive scalars promoted into the gate.

    Case. Three same-shaped judging errors - survival, displacement, wz-difference - all missed what the operator felt; posture metrics had the predictive power (`task-metrics-vs-posture-metrics`, `stand-gate-posture-not-survival`); binary survival saturated and hid a 60% margin gap (`constant-value-dr-overfits-margin`); v5 passed everything on the ground and failed suspended (`suspension-probe-removes-free-stabilizer`); the hip_roll (l+r) scalar predicted real drift direction and ordering and entered the battery (`hip-roll-sum-predicts-lateral-drift`); averages hide chirality (`chirality-scored-separately`); gait-quality gates are judged at speeds that demand a gait (`low-speed-commands-reward-dragging`). The recovery line added the rest of the kit: where failed episodes end, not only where they started (`end-state-confusion-matrix`); a frozen acceptance distribution with a pinned seed (`frozen-acceptance-distribution-and-pinned-seed`); video of the metric rollout itself (`video-as-acceptance-record`); and the admission that a 10 s episode cannot see a stance that fails after a minute (`episode-length-bounds-what-a-gate-sees`). The one-leg line removed a foot-spacing wall that no gate measured, and the feet met on hardware (`removed-wall-returns-on-hardware`).

    Coach application. Review every battery for posture rows, margin columns, per-side scoring, and an assist-stripped condition; when operator feel and gates disagree, suspect the metric class first.

    task-metrics-vs-posture-metricsstand-gate-posture-not-survivalconstant-value-dr-overfits-marginsuspension-probe-removes-free-stabilizerhip-roll-sum-predicts-lateral-driftchirality-scored-separatelylow-speed-commands-reward-draggingend-state-confusion-matrixfrozen-acceptance-distribution-and-pinned-seedvideo-as-acceptance-recordepisode-length-bounds-what-a-gate-seesremoved-wall-returns-on-hardware

15. doctrine-15Fork and root selection: recoverability, maturity, frozen rewards

    Choose fork roots by which candidate's deficits the coming training can pay back (precision is recoverable; lost plasticity, symmetry, and margins are not); prefer mature checkpoints as roots even when younger ones score better as products; never fine-tune through a reward change - continuation is legal only with the reward frozen and plant/DR widening one rung at a time.

    Case. s1e-500 beat higher-precision candidates because its exclusive strengths were unrecoverable (`fork-root-recoverable-shortfall`); the b300 arm proved maturity is capital against adaptation shock (`root-maturity-vs-product-quality`); the B-arm scatter/half-recover/collapse signature falsified reward-change fine-tuning and drew the legal boundary for S2 continuation (`fine-tune-reward-change-falsified`).

    Coach application. For root debates, build the exclusive-strengths table and ask "which side can be trained back?"; require dual-arm evidence for maturity claims; classify any proposed continuation as reward-frozen or not before approving.

    fork-root-recoverable-shortfallroot-maturity-vs-product-qualityfine-tune-reward-change-falsified

16. doctrine-16Curricula: verified engagement, lineage counters, disease-phase gating

    Automatic curricula must prove they engage (a saturated ratchet is constant DR wearing a curriculum's name); every ramp counts lineage-cumulative progress, not per-process steps; penalties aimed at late-stage pathologies ramp in after exploration noise decays; difficulty rises on measured per-stratum success, never on schedule.

    Case. The s1f ratchet capped at iter 248 and never engaged (`auto-curriculum-engagement-check`); the saturation ramp re-fired at +600 after every resume and no shipped product ever saw the penalty (`curriculum-counter-lineage-steps`); the same penalty worked once gated to the disease phase and became an untouchable mechanism (`gate-penalties-to-the-disease-phase`); record-high aggregate reward hid a fully-failing delay stratum (`aggregate-metrics-mask-subgroup-failure`); bucket share is not a gradient lever (`bucket-share-is-not-a-gradient-lever`). An assist curriculum keyed to a pooled success share was withdrawn on the strength of the categories that already worked (`curriculum-criterion-conditioned-on-lagging-category`); a pace set by per-step income moved only when that income was time-gated (`per-step-income-drives-speed-time-gate`), and the same gate had to be retired in a lineage without the disease (`time-gate-vs-wide-stance-retire-the-fix`).

    Coach application. Ask every curriculum three questions: does it engage (show the internal state)? what does it count (process or lineage)? when is it present (against the pathology's phase)? Check where shipped checkpoints sit relative to every ramp.

    auto-curriculum-engagement-checkcurriculum-counter-lineage-stepsgate-penalties-to-the-disease-phaseaggregate-metrics-mask-subgroup-failurebucket-share-is-not-a-gradient-levercurriculum-criterion-conditioned-on-lagging-categoryper-step-income-drives-speed-time-gatetime-gate-vs-wide-stance-retire-the-fix

17. doctrine-17Probe before training: feasibility first, hypotheses in tables

    After two failed training attempts at a skill, stop training: demonstrate the behavior open-loop, enumerate hypotheses in a written table audited against actual configs cheapest-first, race one probe per side of the sim2real boundary for hardware-only pathologies, and use suspended tests to acquit or convict actuators before blaming authority.

    Case. "在黑暗里试钥匙" - four sidewalk rungs failed until an open-loop probe separated exploration/waveform/authority in one experiment (`open-loop-probe-before-reward-tuning`); the foot-drag mystery fell to a seven-hypothesis config audit (`hypothesis-table-code-audit`); the period-doubling was resolved by racing a reward-side and a plant-side evidence line - and both paid off, one per sub-case (`period-doubling-evidence-race`); the suspended test acquitted the roll actuator in one measurement (`suspended-test-isolates-actuator-authority`). A read-only configuration probe told a wall from a slope in the recovery line's seated basin (`configuration-probe-wall-not-slope`), and the fix it pointed to - where the feet are - took prone from 0/159 to 158/159 (`prone-dead-end-is-foot-placement`); a knob that did not move its variable was recorded as no test of the idea (`dof-vel-penalty-is-not-a-pacing-knob`).

    Coach application. When a skill resists training, prescribe the probe before any further reward edits; require verified target trajectories before imitation terms; keep a falsified-fixes list so closed roads stay closed (`amplitude-cut-falsified-yaw-fix`).

    open-loop-probe-before-reward-tuninghypothesis-table-code-auditperiod-doubling-evidence-racesuspended-test-isolates-actuator-authorityconfiguration-probe-wall-not-slopeprone-dead-end-is-foot-placementdof-vel-penalty-is-not-a-pacing-knobamplitude-cut-falsified-yaw-fix

18. doctrine-18External advice is recomputed locally; values transfer as ratios

    Every external suggestion is classified adopt / already-have / modify / trap by recomputing its claim on the local reward table and probe data; numeric values transfer only as dimensionless ratios (to tracking weight, leg length, sqrt(gL), control rate); citations are verified to exist.

    Case. "Start vy very small" would have destroyed sidewalk learning on this reward table - the gradient scales quadratically (`external-advice-audit-against-own-arithmetic`); swing-height targets and weights transferred correctly only through leg-length and tracking-ratio scaling (`transfer-ratios-not-absolutes`); the "6-step delay" was refused for lacking a control rate (`latency-dr-covers-measured-pipeline`); a borrowed reference's structure was FK-verified and its amplitude re-derived from the division of labor (`reference-structure-fk-amplitude-division`); retrieval agents fabricated verbatim arXiv quotes - only source-verifiable material was used; and one dismissed suggestion later proved right for a different mechanism, and was credited (`cycle-average-tracking-for-gait-quantities`). An advisor's staged state machine turned out to exist in none of the three papers it cited, and reading them changed the plan (`advisor-paraphrase-vs-paper`).

    Coach application. Intercept every "paper X does Y" with the local recomputation; convert absolutes to ratios before comparison; verify quotes; revisit dismissed advice when new mechanisms appear.

    external-advice-audit-against-own-arithmetictransfer-ratios-not-absoluteslatency-dr-covers-measured-pipelinereference-structure-fk-amplitude-divisioncycle-average-tracking-for-gait-quantitiesadvisor-paraphrase-vs-paper

19. doctrine-19Hardware sessions are scripted experiments, not tuning sessions

    Real-robot time executes a pre-registered matrix: risk-ordered (baseline first, fragile last with a spotter), stage-gated (suspended smoke before ground), A/B sessions bracketed by a repeated reference run, operators briefed on measured zero-command and untrained-axis behavior, chirality-aware disturbance protocols, no field tuning - the only legal field changes are scripted, single-variable, and self-reversing.

    Case. The S2 acceptance sheet (`risk-ordered-real-deployment`, `battery-bracketed-real-ab`, `know-zero-command-behavior`, `push-test-chirality-protocol`, `no-field-tuning-protocol`); the RAM-only torque experiment with automatic power-cycle rollback (`reversible-single-variable-field-experiments`); and the sim-veto rule - even sim's condemnations get one safeguarded hardware check when they judge the purpose-built configuration (`sim-veto-needs-real-confirmation`). The recovery line's first real run went ahead with its preconditions unmet and was stopped as dangerous (`first-real-get-up-violent-stage-one-policy`); after it: a staged hang, mat and floor protocol (`staged-hang-mat-floor-for-get-up`), a fixed power-cycle pre-flight and two-machine discipline (`power-cycle-preflight`, `two-machine-config-discipline`), a fall guard replaced rather than switched off (`fall-guard-becomes-a-state`), and logs that are part of the run (`hardware-log-is-the-attribution-input`).

    Coach application. Turn every hardware request into a runbook with order, gates, brackets, briefing, and anomaly plays; refuse improvised parameter changes on the floor.

    risk-ordered-real-deploymentbattery-bracketed-real-abknow-zero-command-behaviorpush-test-chirality-protocolno-field-tuning-protocolreversible-single-variable-field-experimentssim-veto-needs-real-confirmationfirst-real-get-up-violent-stage-one-policystaged-hang-mat-floor-for-get-uppower-cycle-preflighttwo-machine-config-disciplinefall-guard-becomes-a-statehardware-log-is-the-attribution-input

20. doctrine-20Close questions in writing; restart when the debt is structural

    Audited questions get frozen verdicts with citable wording and an explicit reopening bar; hardware verdicts are dated by deployment-stack and calibration state and expire when those change; and when successive rungs shuffle symptoms without net progress, freeze the lineage as regression baselines, pay the structural debts, and retrain minimal - carrying laws and instruments, not weights.

    Case. The chirality and COM questions were closed with frozen wording and "no reopening without new hard evidence" (`frozen-verdicts-semantic-boundaries`); v5/v6's condemnations expired with the deploy stack (`stale-verdicts-under-old-stack`); a 2-degree calibration fix moved the whole runnable envelope (`zero-offset-calibration-shifts-envelope`); plant upgrades are era boundaries with paired re-baselining (`plant-swap-invariants-vs-shifts`); and the 2026-08-05 reset froze v5-v11, fixed the latency FIFO / manifest / sampling / reward-table debts, and restarted - producing the lineage that reached hardware SOTA (`freeze-lineage-fix-structure-restart`, `minimal-reward-table-with-provenance`). The recovery line's real-robot verdicts ended up in three places that disagree, one of them an undated note in a command file (`write-hardware-verdicts-back`).

    Coach application. Maintain the closed-questions ledger and quote it when symptoms recur; stamp verdicts with stack/calibration versions; when a team is three rungs into symptom-shuffling, raise the restart question explicitly with the freeze-fix-restart pattern.

    frozen-verdicts-semantic-boundariesstale-verdicts-under-old-stackzero-offset-calibration-shifts-envelopeplant-swap-invariants-vs-shiftsfreeze-lineage-fix-structure-restartminimal-reward-table-with-provenancewrite-hardware-verdicts-back

21. doctrine-21Name the quantity in the space it lives in

    A goal, reward term or acceptance criterion about the feet, the base or the contact state is computed from the quantity itself - world poses, forces, per-category outcomes - never through a joint-angle, single-signal or pooled stand-in that assumes everything else sits at nominal; and every detector is validated on a behaviour known not to contain the event before it becomes a gate.

    Case. The recovery line was caught three times: |ankle roll| as "flat feet" sold stance width and the real robot slid into the splits, a hip-roll criterion was confounded by 50 deg of yaw, and the joint table said 0.271 m where the feet were 0.159 m apart; task-space terms produced the first flat, wide stance (`joint-space-proxy-for-task-space-quantity`). Flight detection lied in both directions across two lines - foot height flagged 40% false flight on a walking gait, contact force alone flagged slip chatter as hops (`contact-detector-single-signal-lies`). A pooled height average described a robot that did not exist - six in ten standing, four in ten sitting (`zero-partial-credit-is-not-an-iteration-problem`) - and the walking line had learned the same lesson on yaw rate (`heading-integral-not-body-rate`).

    Coach application. For every reward term and gate row, ask what physical quantity it stands for and whether it is measured directly; flag joint-space or single-signal stand-ins for task-space goals, ask for a detector validated on a negative control, and split pooled metrics by category before reading them.

    joint-space-proxy-for-task-space-quantitycontact-detector-single-signal-lieszero-partial-credit-is-not-an-iteration-problemheading-integral-not-body-rate

22. doctrine-22Continuation needs a live gradient; a release is chosen by a scan

    Continue a converged policy only on a change that creates a live gradient, on a short budget, with every checkpoint scanned on the transfer axis; choose a release by running the full battery over a band of checkpoints and stop on signals, never by taking the last one; and when edits to the terminal phase cannot move a behaviour, roll back and retrain with the constraint present from the start, keeping the order in which the lineage acquired its mechanisms as explicit curriculum phases.

    Case. A continuation with no new gradient drifted MuJoCo transfer from 100/98% to 80/28% while every Isaac gate stayed perfect, and a live-gradient continuation at the same depth kept it (`converged-continuation-is-poison`). One-leg checkpoints 100 iterations apart failed 1 and 38 of 40 cells, and late ones degraded (`checkpoint-choice-is-a-full-gate-scan`). Four in-lineage stance fixes failed because the stance was the end of the get-up path, and from scratch it grew right (`stance-decided-by-get-up-path`); fixes stacked on degraded states were rolled back by the user (`stop-stacking-roll-back-and-audit`); and the lineage's final recipe, trained from scratch in one run, sat at 0% because the order of its curriculum was part of the product (`curriculum-history-is-part-of-the-product`). The omni line's short adaptation budgets and mature roots are the same law seen from the other side (`continuation-budget-not-from-zero`, `root-maturity-vs-product-quality`).

    Coach application. Before approving a continuation, ask for the new gradient, the budget and the transfer axis in the scan; before approving a release, ask for the scan; after three rungs without progress on the target, propose rolling back to the last good checkpoint and a from-scratch phase plan instead of a fourth patch.

    converged-continuation-is-poisoncheckpoint-choice-is-a-full-gate-scanstance-decided-by-get-up-pathstop-stacking-roll-back-and-auditcurriculum-history-is-part-of-the-productcontinuation-budget-not-from-zeroroot-maturity-vs-product-quality

Experience cards

171 cards matching “resolved-config-is-source-of-truth”.

• The median of a bimodal metric lands in the empty gap - check the distribution, and never judge swing on 3 seedsmedian-hides-bimodal-distribution

  Replicatedomnisim-evalmeasurementgate-batteryprocess

  Before quoting a median or mean, look at the distribution; report suspected-bimodal metrics as mode share plus per-mode ranges, use small-seed smoke runs only to screen trends, and size the seed count for decisions by the share resolution you need (here: 20).

  Symptom

  Years of "high swing variance" and undecidable 3-seed swing readings turned out to be one fact: the metric was bimodal all along - "历代 swing 高方差与 3-seed 不可判由此定性:一直在测双稳态系统" - and every median reported from it (e.g. 12.1 mm) described a value no seed ever produced.

  Context

  Concrete instances: s2e_pd-1400's 20 seeds split 2.6-4.9 mm vs 19.3-24.0 mm with zero seeds between; s1e-500 read 3.9 mm on seeds 0-2 but 23.1 mm median over 20 seeds; a 3-seed reading of 19.3 was logged as "double-peak optimism, lesson recurrence #4". The selection re-audit codified the sampling rule: "3-seed 的 swing 读数不可判点, 只能筛带,选点必须 20-seed" - 3 seeds may screen a band, only 20 seeds may pick a point.

  Change

  Swing (and any suspected multi-modal metric) reported as mode shares plus per-mode ranges instead of a bare median; 3-seed smoke numbers demoted to band-screening; all shipping/selection decisions moved to 20-seed batteries.

  Outcome

  The "swing debt" bookkeeping was reinterpreted as basin probability (see swing-bistability-damping-switch), and checkpoint selection stopped being whipsawed by which basin the first three seeds happened to fall into.

  Mechanism

  Central-tendency statistics presuppose unimodality; on a bimodal distribution the median tracks the mode SHARE, not any achievable behavior, and small samples alias the share entirely. Mode-aware reporting (share + per-mode stats) is the only faithful summary, and the needed sample size is set by the share resolution required.

  Applies when

  • a quality metric shows chronic high variance across seeds
  • 3-seed smoke readings contradict 20-seed batteries
  • reporting swing height, clearance, or any basin-prone metric

  “中位数落在空档里,「swing 债 −11mm」实为「50% 概率掉进拖地吸引子」。历代 swing 高方差与 3-seed 不可判由此定性:一直在测双稳态系统。… swing 跨 seed 双峰 (500 在 seed0~2 只读 3.9mm, 20-seed 中位 23.1) —— 3-seed 的 swing 读数不可判点, 只能筛带, 选点必须 20-seed。”

• A reward on a quantity the actor cannot observe teaches "produce less of it", never "correct it" - closed-loop correction needs an outer loopreward-observability-limit

  Mechanism understoodomniobservation-designobservation-honestyreward-shapingcontract-freeze

  Before adding a reward, check the actor can observe (or infer) the quantity: unobservable-error rewards buy only average suppression - route correction tasks to an outer loop whose commands stay in distribution, and do not break a frozen contract to add an observation a deploy-side loop can supply.

  Symptom

  Heading kept drifting despite world-frame yaw rewards, and a reviewer proposed heading-error rewards - raising the question of what yaw shaping can even teach this actor.

  Context

  The adopted architectural verdict: the actor's 45-dim base observation cannot see accumulated heading at all - projected_gravity is invariant to rotation about the gravity axis, and omega_z is a rate, not an angle. World-frame yaw-rate rewards are therefore privileged shaping that can only teach "少产生旋转" (generate less rotation), never "偏了以后拉回原线" (pull back to the line after drifting) - the policy cannot represent the error it would need to correct. The S1 gate (<=5 deg / 10 s) demands exactly the former, so the stack is right for its gate; active heading correction is assigned to the deployment outer loop (--heading P-loop converting heading error into in-distribution wz commands) plus small-wz training - and the 215-dim contract is explicitly NOT extended with a heading observation ("契约不加 heading 观测,冻结不动"). The reviewer's companion bias hypothesis was adjudicated with data: drift is bimodal - a basin mechanism decides whether you leave (seeds vary +/-16-46 deg vs -385 to -391 deg), and once out, rotation direction is constant (weight chirality; candidate root: the phase clock always swings left first).

  Change

  Yaw shaping kept as rate-tracking (three-layer stack); heading correction owned by the deploy outer loop; contract frozen; the "which behaviors need an outer loop" question settled by observability analysis rather than reward tuning.

  Outcome

  Stopped a contract change and a futile reward direction; drift work split correctly into rate-suppression (trainable) and error correction (outer loop), consistent with the earlier measured 10x drift reduction from the deploy-side loop.

  Mechanism

  A policy can only condition on its observation sigma-algebra; rewards on functions outside it shift the marginal action distribution (open-loop average effects) but cannot create feedback on the unobserved variable. Whether to add an observation, an outer loop, or accept average-shaping is decided by the task's gate: suppression gates need shaping, correction gates need the variable in some loop's view.

  Applies when

  • adding rewards on accumulated/世界-frame quantities (heading, position)
  • deciding between a new observation, an outer loop, and shaping
  • a drift symptom persists across reward-weight changes

  “actor 的 45 维基座观测不到累计航向(projected_gravity 对绕重力轴旋转不变,ωz 是速率不是角度)——世界系 yaw 奖励是特权塑形,只能教「少产生旋转」,不能教「偏了以后拉回原线」。… 主动纠偏闭环 = S3 把小 wz 进分布 + deploy --heading 外环 … 215 契约不加 heading 观测,冻结不动。”

• Before training a one-leg stand, the accounts and a probe showed the default gains could not hold it at all - kp 20 needs 0.39 rad of error to carry the static roll moment, more than the whole adduction range - so per-joint gains came first, and thermal limits set the session lengthsingle-support-gain-authority-probe

  Mechanism understoodonelegplant-calibrationactuator-modelingplant-calibrationhardware

  Before training a posture that loads one joint statically, compute the steady tracking error load/kp and the series stiffness against m*g*h, and prove with a simple hand-written controller that the posture can be held under the deployment gains - change the gains first if it cannot; then size session length from the thermal account.

  Symptom

  The one-leg line (standing on one foot, the other folded back, no hopping) had to decide whether the existing gain profile could hold single support before any reward was designed.

  Context

  Hardware accounts (9.792 kg, COM 0.234 m high, 170 x 80 mm feet, legs 80% of the mass): moving the COM over one foot needs 107 mm of shift and the 20 deg hip-roll adduction range gives 131 mm - geometrically enough. The static frontal moment is 7.8-9 N*m, within RS02's 17 N*m - torque is enough. But at kp 20 carrying 7.8 N*m needs 0.39 rad of tracking error, more than the entire adduction range, and the real robot had already shown it: commanded +0.17, actual -0.04 (0.21 rad droop) under load, 0.0008 rad hanging - load, not the motor. A probe (probe_oneleg.py) then showed open-loop PD cannot hold single support on physics grounds, so the criterion became "an equilibrium exists and a hand-written 4-gain COM feedback can hold it": single-support roll stiffness is hip and ankle in series and must exceed m*g*h_com = 22.5 N*m/rad; ankle kp 12 in series with hip kp 80 gives only 10.4 (open loop 16/16 fell), ankle 60 with hip 80 gives 34.3 (52% margin).

  Change

  A per-joint gain profile (rl_oneleg: hip_roll kp 80, ankle_roll kp 60, the rest as rl_default) - which needed per-joint gain support in robot.yaml, the bridge, deploy and the trainer's actuator groups - decided before training. Thermal account: single support makes hip_roll the dominant heat load (about 7.8 N*m against a 7 N*m continuous rating), so acceptance and demos run in segments of at most 60 s with a temperature check.

  Outcome

  Under rl_oneleg the hand-written feedback held six cells cleanly for 6 s (hip_roll steady torque 2.1-3.4 N*m, half the thermal budget); under rl_default the same feedback on the same cells fell 0/4. The trained V0 policy then passed its 40-cell acceptance.

  Mechanism

  With PD position control, the steady error needed to carry a static load is load/kp; when that error exceeds the joint's range the posture is unreachable whatever the policy does, and series compliance between joints lowers the effective stiffness below the gravity stiffness that single support demands.

  Applies when

  • single-support, crouched or one-arm-load postures on PD actuators
  • a joint "droops" under load on hardware but tracks well when hanging
  • deciding whether a new skill needs its own gain profile

  “但 kp=20 时撑住 7.8 N·m 需要 **0.39 rad 跟踪误差 > 整个内收行程**。真机已实测: 命令 +0.17 实际 −0.04（droop 0.21 rad），悬挂时 0.0008 rad——是负载不是电机。 … 单支撑滚转是 hip/ankle **串联**刚度，必须 > m·g·h_com = 22.5 N·m/rad；ankle kp12 串 hip80 只有 10.4（开环 16/16 全摔），60 串 80 = 34.3（裕 52%） … **rl_default 同反馈同格 0/4 全摔**（增益档必要性对照）”

• Slowing the gait clock at deployment is out-of-distribution and backfires - lower the commanded speed instead, or train the knobcycle-time-override-is-ood

  Mechanism understoodwalkreal-deployreal-acceptanceattributioncontract-freeze

  Any deployment override must correspond to a dimension the policy was trained to handle; to make a parameter field-adjustable, randomize it in training and observe it - otherwise use the levers inside the trained envelope (commands) and leave the knob alone.

  Symptom

  Real-robot feedback "walks very fast and unstable" suggested slowing the gait; a deploy-side --cycle-time override existed, making "just slow the clock" a one-flag temptation.

  Context

  A sim sweep of the override on walk_v6 @cmd 0.3 showed monotone degradation away from the trained 0.40 s cycle: at 0.50 s tilt jumped 7.9 -> 13.2 deg and landing force 1.52x -> 2.24x; at 0.80 s (half speed) clearance collapsed to 3 mm - dragging again - with 20 deg tilt. Meanwhile the legitimate lever, lowering the commanded speed with the clock untouched, improved everything monotonically: cmd 0.1 gave 104% tracking, 6.7 deg tilt, minimum slip - the most stable operating point. The file distinguishes the two "slows" explicitly: lower command = smaller steps at the same 2.5 Hz rhythm; a slower rhythm itself requires retraining - randomize cycle_time (e.g. 0.40-0.65 s) during training and expose it as an observation, and only then does --cycle-time become a field-adjustable knob.

  Change

  Deployment guidance: never ship a cycle-time override the policy was not trained under; respond to "too fast/unstable" with lower commands; schedule clock variability as a training-time (contract-level) change if a field knob is wanted.

  Outcome

  The sweep quantified the trap before hardware paid for it (dragging and 2.2x landing force at slowed clocks); cmd 0.1 documented as the stable demo point.

  Mechanism

  The policy is a function fitted around the training distribution; a deploy-side override moves an input (phase rate) to values never seen, so behavior degrades unpredictably - the knob LOOKS like a capability because it exists in the code, but capability lives in the training distribution, not the interface.

  Applies when

  • a deploy tool exposes overrides (clock, scale, gains) beyond the training distribution
  • hardware feels "too fast/aggressive" and a quick knob exists
  • deciding between a deploy-side tweak and a retrain

  “0.80s | 1.25Hz | 0.165 | 3mm(拖地) | 20.0° … 慢一半直接崩 … 策略按 0.40 训练, 别的周期属分布外。… 降指令速度才是有效杠杆 … cmd 0.1 是最稳的工作点。… 要节奏本身变慢必须重训 —— 训练期把 cycle_time 随机化(如 0.40~0.65s)并作为观测的一维, 部署时 --cycle-time 就成了现场可调的旋钮。”

• Two simulators disagreed 1.8x on one policy's torque demand - four explanations were eliminated with numbers, the surviving suspect was never tested, and neither reading was allowed to cancel the othertorque-disagreement-between-simulators-unresolved

  Hypothesisrecoverysim2sim-gatesim2simactuator-modelingattribution

  When two simulators disagree on a safety-relevant quantity, eliminate the measurement explanations one at a time with numbers, name the survivor as a hypothesis, keep the pessimistic reading binding, and run the direct test (replay one action sequence open-loop through both plants) before the quantity is used to pass a gate for hardware.

  Symptom

  For R3.0, Isaac read hip_pitch torque demand at 75-80% of the limit (PASS); MuJoCo read the same policy at 148-152% (1.5x over the limit).

  Context

  Candidates were eliminated one by one: PD gains (identical, RS06 kp 30 / kd 1.5), the settle window (both skip the first 0.5 s), the statistic (worse-of-two-legs vs per-joint - explains ~15%), self-collision (the no-contact subset still read 152%), sampling (500 Hz peak vs 50 Hz sample - ~9%). About 1.8x remained. The prime suspect - Isaac's implicit actuator (PD solved inside the PhysX integration, chosen to mimic kHz firmware PD) against MuJoCo's 500 Hz explicit PD - was named but untested.

  Change

  The Isaac PASS was recorded as valid for the Isaac plant only; the prescribed decider was an open-loop replay of one action sequence through both plants, compared step by step, needing no training. It was upgraded to a precondition of R3.1.

  Outcome

  R3.1 ran in parallel with, not after, the replay, and the replay never appears as done. By §40 it was "the oldest open account" on the line, to be fed by real-robot logs - which the spec also never records. Meanwhile the 50 Hz sample under-read the peak by 34% as smoothing narrowed the spikes, so Isaac-side readings grew more optimistic exactly when the comparison mattered more.

  Mechanism

  Each measurement artifact explained a slice of the gap; what remained is a plant difference, and an untested plant hypothesis cannot license discarding the pessimistic simulator on a safety-relevant quantity.

  Conflicts

  The spec prescribes the open-loop replay (§23), upgrades it to an R3.1 precondition, then records that R3.1 ran in parallel without it (§24), and lists it as the oldest open account before hardware (§40); nothing through §50 (2026-08-14) records a result. Every later "torque gate PASS" on this line is an Isaac-plant reading plus a MuJoCo check, never a reconciled one.

  Applies when

  • Isaac and MuJoCo (or sim and hardware) report different torques, contacts or slips
  • implicit vs explicit actuator models are in play
  • a gate passes on one simulator only

  “**同一个策略,一侧判 PASS 一侧判超限 1.5 倍。** … 口径项全部扣掉后仍剩 **~1.8×** 没有解释。 … 但**这条没有验证,不能拿它当结论去抵消 MuJoCo 的读数**。 … (做法:拿同一条 动作序列在两边开环回放,逐拍比 τ —— 不需要重训)”

• A joint-velocity penalty meant to slow the get-up cut joint speed 16% and left the get-up time unchanged - the knob never moved the variable, so the idea it was meant to test stayed untesteddof-vel-penalty-is-not-a-pacing-knob

  Mechanism understoodrecoveryreward-shapingreward-shapingattribution

  Before reading a result as a test of an idea, check that the knob actually moved the independent variable; velocity regularizers smooth a schedule they do not set, and a schedule driven by per-step task income moves only when that income's time structure does.

  Symptom

  The get-up took 0.6-0.9 s in Isaac with large torque demand; the user proposed getting up more slowly so less torque would be needed.

  Context

  The idea had support in the accounts: the acceptance bound is an upper bound of 5 s (5-8x margin), the quasi-static squat path peaks at 25% of the limits, and rolling over needs no momentum. R3.2 raised dof_vel from -1e-3 to -5e-3 as the single variable.

  Change

  dof_vel -1e-3 -> -5e-3 (child-run from R3.1).

  Outcome

  Get-up medians moved +0.02-0.04 s (noise); raw joint velocity -16%; torque demand median got worse (hip_pitch 46-48% -> 63-67%) as the new term competed with torque_headroom on the same joints; MuJoCo 98 -> 96%. Verdict FAIL on the knob, not on the idea, and the rung was not adopted. When pace was later attacked through the income's time structure (V2.5/V2.5b), the MuJoCo get-up moved into the 3.5-4.5 s design band.

  Mechanism

  The pace was set by base_height_progress paying for every step spent high (stand earlier, earn more); a velocity regularizer only smooths motion along the same schedule and does not change when the robot stands up.

  Applies when

  • trying to make a skill slower or gentler with smoothness penalties
  • an experiment's primary metric did not move and a verdict is being written
  • two penalties act on the same joints

  “**关键判读:`dof_vel` 罚只把关节速度压了 16%,而起身用时一点没变。** 也就是说**这一级根本没有把"慢下来"这个自变量推动起来** —— 所以它**不构成对 用户假说的检验** … 起身节奏由 `base_height_progress` 的逐步计酬决定(早站起来就多 拿),速度正则只在同一条时间轨迹上把动作抹匀,不改变何时站起来。”

• When the training reset distribution changes, freeze the acceptance distribution separately and pin its seed - the same checkpoint measured twice differed by 3.8 and 10.2 pointsfrozen-acceptance-distribution-and-pinned-seed

  Mechanism understoodrecoverysim-evalgate-batterymeasurement

  Acceptance distributions are frozen artifacts, decoupled from whatever the training distribution becomes and evaluated with a pinned seed, and every gate row carries its sample size so that a small-n row is never read as a regression.

  Symptom

  R0.3 added easier roll-arc start states to the training resets, and the acceptance script shared the training category table; separately, the same checkpoint scored side 3.8 points and mid 10.2 points differently on two runs of the same script.

  Context

  Acceptance ran 512 parallel envs drawn from the fall categories. Had it kept following the training table, 15% of acceptance samples would have landed on states easier than prone - inflated scores and generations that could not be compared. The two same-checkpoint runs had identical per-item height medians, so the ruler had not changed; the spread was reset resampling noise (side n ~ 169, sigma 2.3%; mid n ~ 35, sigma 8.3%). The spec's "20 seeds" had always meant controlled seeds.

  Change

  accept_recovery.ACCEPT_CATEGORIES pinned to the four R0-R0.2 categories and decoupled from the training FALL_CATEGORIES; --seed 20260809 pinned, after which two consecutive runs were bit-identical. The mid row (n ~ 35) was labelled the bluntest gate.

  Outcome

  Every later generation (R0.3 through V3.1) was scored on the frozen distribution and seed, which is what let R0.3's intermediate state be read as "no measurable gain" (62.7 -> 62.1%) and R0.2's mid drop be booked as noise rather than a regression.

  Mechanism

  An acceptance set that follows the training distribution measures a moving target, and an unpinned reset draw adds sampling noise that small-n rows cannot absorb.

  Applies when

  • the training reset or command distribution changes between generations
  • repeated evaluations of one checkpoint disagree
  • a small category drives a pass/fail decision

  “**分布冻结**:`accept_recovery.ACCEPT_CATEGORIES` 钉死 §5 四类 … 与训练侧 `FALL_CATEGORIES` **解耦**。 … **side 差 3.8 点、mid 差 10.2 点**(h 中位逐项一致,证明不是尺子变了)—— 纯 reset 重采样噪声 … 钉死后两次连跑逐位相同。”

• A hardware run without its log is an anecdote - the first real get-up's policy, gain profile and log were never recorded, two CSVs stayed "to be reported", and runbook commands wrote different policies' logs under one copied filenamehardware-log-is-the-attribution-input

  Replicatedinfrareal-deployreal-acceptancemeasurementprocess

  Make the log part of the run: name it from the policy and conditions automatically (never by hand-copied filenames), record the policy digest and gain profile inside it, include what the open questions need (torque, joint positions and targets), and treat a session without a collected log as incomplete.

  Symptom

  The recovery line's oldest open question - whether Isaac or MuJoCo reads torque demand correctly - was waiting on real-robot logs that never arrived, and the verdicts that did arrive could not be tied to files.

  Context

  deploy_policy writes a CSV per run (--log); the runbook's own analysis snippet reads its joint-position, target and action columns (q_, tgt_, act_), and the recovery hanging checklist asks for torque and joint logs for the whole run, to be compared with simulation. The first real get-up (08-09): policy, gain profile and log "to be recorded later". The first real A/B (08-11): v2_5b's result and both policies' CSVs "to be reported". In the runbook's walking commands, three runs of two different c4 policies log to real_s1e_pw08_teleop_0808.csv, and s1e and s2e_fric runs log to real_c2_700_pw08_teleop_0808.csv - filenames copied from other commands.

  Change

  None recorded; the spec kept listing the open-loop comparison as waiting for real logs.

  Outcome

  No real-robot log appears in the recovery spec through §50, so the simulator disagreement stayed unresolved and hardware verdicts stayed unattached to data.

  Mechanism

  Attribution needs the run's identity (policy digest, profile, conditions) and its signals in one artifact; a filename copied from another command mislabels the file, and a log not collected at the session is rarely collected later.

  Applies when

  • planning a hardware session whose result should settle a sim question
  • log filenames are typed or pasted by hand
  • hardware feedback arrives as prose without files

  “python tools/deploy_policy.py --policy train/policies/omni_c4_ff800_pj.onnx … --log train/real_logs/real_s1e_pw08_teleop_0808.csv … q,t,a=d[:,c("q_")],d[:,c("tgt_")],d[:,c("act_")]”

• A DR tail the robot never has is pure cost - stage deterministic plant levels instead of one wide uniformdr-tail-plant-continuation

  Mechanism understoodomnidr-tuningdomain-randomizationcurriculumactuator-modeling

  Set every DR range from the measured deployment distribution and cut tails that hardware cannot produce; when an axis changes the controller's character (delay, major gain regimes), prefer staged deterministic levels with gates over one wide uniform.

  Symptom

  Two consecutive lineages (s1e, s1f) trained under uniform latency DR (0, 0.06 s = 0-3 frames) both converged to drag-glide gaits - buying survival under heavy delay by giving up swing (3.6 mm) - even though the real pipeline never exceeds ~2 frames.

  Context

  The account: roughly 1/3 of training quality was spent on the >2 frame tail that hardware never presents ("uniform 尾部 ~1/3 训练质量 花在真机不出现的 >2 帧上"). The deeper reading came from the user: uniform 0-3 frames is not merely tail-heavy - it "把性质不同的控制系统 混进同一 PPO batch" (mixes qualitatively different control systems into one PPO batch); a 0-frame and a 3-frame plant demand different controllers, and one policy trained on the mixture serves neither. The S2 v2 ladder therefore redefined latency "从「随机化参数」重新定 义为 actuator/control plant 的一部分": deterministic FIFO levels, staged 1 frame then 2 frames (lo=hi so fractional interpolation degenerates to exact N frames, synonymous with the harness --delay N), each level gated by the fixed acceptance battery - a plant continuation, not a randomization.

  Change

  Latency DR replaced by staged deterministic levels covering the measured 1-2 tick reality with no tail; each stage a separate continuation rung with the standard gate and rollback.

  Outcome

  The s2_lag1 rung showed the clean-signal benefit immediately (survival 20/20, heading 6x recovery) with the swing cost booked honestly (21 -> 12 mm, half-pass, ladder paused for adjudication); the drag-glide attractor from uniform tails did not recur.

  Mechanism

  DR asks one policy to cover a plant family; when part of the family is fictitious, the policy pays real capability for fictitious robustness, and when family members demand structurally different controllers, gradient averaging produces a compromise controller optimal for none. A measured, discrete plant set matches the actual deployment support and keeps each rung's training signal coherent.

  Applies when

  • policies converge to degenerate gaits that buy worst-case survival
  • a DR range extends well past the measured hardware range
  • choosing between wide randomization and a staged ladder on an axis

  “两轮实证(s1e/s1f)宽尾延迟 DR 逼出拖地滑行 … uniform 0~3 帧不止尾重,而是把性质不同的 控制系统混进同一 PPO batch;1→2 帧确定性分级 = plant continuation,训练信号干净得多—— latency 从「随机化参数」重新定义为 actuator/control plant 的一部分。”

• Compare the achieved reward to the computed ignore-floor to tell "never learned" from "learned but unprofitable"ignore-floor-diagnosis

  Mechanism understoodomniattributionattributionreward-shaping

  For any skill that trains flat, compute the reward the null policy would earn on that term; achieved==floor means the behavior never paid out (find why: exploration, reward observability, or feasibility) - do not tune weights first.

  Symptom

  C4 sidewalk failed on both arms; the question was whether the policy had found sidewalk and rejected it as unprofitable, or never found it at all - two diagnoses with opposite fixes.

  Context

  The theoretical value of the sidewalk tracking term for a policy that completely ignores the command was computable from the command distribution: 0.189. Trained final values landed at 0.187 (arm A) and 0.204 (arm B) - sitting exactly on the ignore-floor - while the honest balance at the optimum actually favored sidewalking (net +0.88/step inside the side bucket). Later the same arithmetic closed the whole saga: for the true reward landscape, doing real sidewalk scored 0.153 vs 0.944 for ignoring - the policy's refusal "是理性最优，不是探索失败" (rational optimum, not exploration failure) under one hypothesis, and under the final measurement-corrected account the policy had "每一次都在 做理性选择" (made the rational choice every time).

  Change

  Diagnostic rule adopted: compute the ignore-floor for the new term; if the achieved value sits on it, the behavior was never expressed in useful volume (or the reward cannot distinguish it - check both); if the achieved value is above floor but the behavior is absent at deployment, the policy sampled it and priced it out - then the reward balance, not exploration, is the lever.

  Outcome

  Correctly identified that PPO had not merely under-valued sidewalk; each subsequent hypothesis (waveform sign, regularization cage, exploration form, reward kernel) was tested against this floor arithmetic, which kept the search honest through three reversals.

  Mechanism

  Every reward term has a computable value under the null behavior; the achieved-vs-floor gap is a one-number audit of whether the optimizer ever monetized the target behavior. It converts "training failed" into one of two mechanistically distinct states with different fixes.

  Applies when

  • a new skill's tracking reward plateaus early
  • deciding between exploration fixes and reward-weight fixes
  • post-mortem of a failed curriculum rung

  “track_lin_vel_y_exp 训练终值恰好坐在「完全无视指令」的底分上（A 0.187 / B 0.204，理论值 0.189），而终点 balance 明明有利（side 桶内净 +0.88/步）。不是学会了不划算，是根本没学到。”

• Export every CAD part in the whole-machine frame so URDF rotations are zero and inertia is exacturdf-shared-origin-export

  Observed onceinfraplant-calibrationplant-calibrationhardwareprocess

  Generate the model so that correctness is structural: shared-origin STL export, zero rotations, subtraction-only origins, and an explicit 1e-9 g*mm^2 -> kg*m^2 conversion - never hand-rotate inertia tensors.

  Symptom

  Hand-assembled URDFs accumulate per-link rotation/origin errors and unit-conversion mistakes in inertia tensors - silent plant corruption that no later calibration can cleanly fix.

  Context

  Documented CAD -> URDF -> USD procedure from a successful Isaac Lab deployment, kept as the recipe if Lucen regenerates its model.

  Change

  (1) In CAD, align the whole robot to Z-up, X-forward (Isaac Lab convention) and ground the assembly; (2) export each STL with other parts hidden but the machine's shared origin kept, so all parts share one origin, every URDF rotation is 0, and inertia matrices equal CAD values directly; (3) units: Fusion 360 gives g*mm^2, URDF wants kg*m^2 - multiply by 1e-9; (4) link origin = negative of the joint position; link COM = CAD COM minus joint position; joint origin = difference of the two joint positions; (5) after URDF -> USD import, open the USD separately and set it instanceable before saving.

  Outcome

  A URDF whose rotations are all zero and whose inertia tensors are CAD-exact, eliminating an entire class of hand-transcription plant errors.

  Mechanism

  Keeping one shared origin turns every frame transform into a pure translation computable by subtraction, and leaves inertia tensors in the frame CAD already computed them in - no rotation of inertia tensors, the most error-prone manual step, is ever needed.

  Applies when

  • building or regenerating URDF/MJCF from CAD
  • inertia or frame bugs suspected in the plant model
  • importing URDF into Isaac Lab / USD

  “导出 STL 时隐藏其他零件但导出整机——这样所有零件共享同一原点，URDF 里所有 rotation 全是 0，惯量矩阵直接等于 CAD 值 / 单位：Fusion 360 给 g·mm²，URDF 要 kg·m²，乘 1e-9 / link origin = 该关节坐标取负 … URDF → USD 导入后必须单独打开 USD 设成 instanceable 再存”

• Before training a one-leg stand the spec named the cheapest cheats - hopping on the support foot, a raised foot resting unloaded, a leg tripod - and gave each a countermeasure and a gate; one still appeared and was caught by exactly those gatesenumerate-cheapest-cheats-before-training

  Observed onceonelegreward-shapingreward-shapinggate-battery

  Before training, list the cheapest behaviours that would satisfy each reward term without doing the task, give each a countermeasure in the reward and a gate in acceptance, and prove the intended behaviour is reachable with a probe - then treat any gate the policy games as evidence about the reward, not the gate.

  Symptom

  The literature's single-leg benchmark reports eight state-of-the-art general policies holding a clean one-leg stand 0 times out of 90 - they survive by sneaking steps and hops - so the task's first adversary was the policy's own cheating.

  Context

  The spec's shape self-check ("what is the zero-cost option?") listed, for the one-foot bucket: the cheapest cheat, a foot resting on the ground without load, countered by a 5 N contact threshold plus positive swing income; the second cheapest, small hops on the support foot to reset balance, countered by a continuous support-air penalty plus a gate of zero support-foot flight segments. The probe that preceded training had already seen a third: early low-lift postures "survived" by pressing the swing foot at 78-95 N, a leg tripod, removed by folding the shank back. The two-foot bucket was checked too: its zero-cost behaviour is ordinary standing, with no odd base state.

  Change

  Countermeasures and gates written before training: swing-contact and support-air penalties, gate 2 (zero swing-foot contact frames above 5 N), gate 3 (zero support-foot flight segments).

  Outcome

  The first run still found the unloaded-foot cheat (a binary reward band gave it no gradient to lift) - and it was caught, by the contact gates and the cross-simulator comparison, not discovered on hardware. The retrained V0 passed all gates 40/40, including zero support-foot flight after the flight detector was corrected.

  Mechanism

  A policy optimizes the reward, not the intent; the cheapest behaviours that satisfy the reward are predictable from the reward's structure, and a gate written for each before training turns a silent cheat into a failed row.

  Applies when

  • designing rewards for balance, contact or "hold still" tasks
  • benchmark policies are known to cheat the task
  • writing acceptance gates for a new skill

  “文献里 8 个 SOTA 通用策略在单脚站基准上 0/90 干净保持， 全靠偷步偷跳活命，这是本任务的第一反作弊对象 … 单脚桶下最便宜的作弊是"脚虚放地上不受力"——接触判定 >5 N 力阈（沿用），配 swing_height_band 正收入拉开。 … 第二便宜是"支撑脚小跳重置"——support_air_penalty 连续罚 + 验收门支撑脚腾空段=0 双保险。”

• A real-robot verdict is (policy x deployment stack) - when the stack changes materially, old verdicts expirestale-verdicts-under-old-stack

  Mechanism understoodwalkreal-acceptancereal-acceptanceattributionprocess

  Date every hardware verdict with the deployment-stack version it was measured under; after any material stack change, re-test before trusting old condemnations or old praises - with the interpretation of each possible result written down first.

  Symptom

  walk_v5 stood condemned as "kicks wildly" and walk_v6 as "cannot walk unassisted" - but those verdicts were issued under an earlier deployment stack (--heading did not exist yet, several fixes had just landed); only v7 had ever run under the current unified stack.

  Context

  New sim evidence sharpened the doubt: a same-harness four-version sweep showed v6 was the HEALTHIEST archive at the real operating point (cmd 0.15: dominant frequency locked at 2.50, steps 35:35 perfectly symmetric, foot distance 203/190 mm best of four, mean tilt 4.2 deg, saturation 15%). A full re-test under the unified stack was scheduled with per-version questions and a pre-filled interpretation table ("判读表(预填假设,回来对号)"): e.g. v6 walks + frequency ~2.5 -> old verdict was the stack's fault, v6 becomes the comparison champion; v6 walks but at ~1.25 -> period-doubling on hardware = confirmed plant gap, actuator fitting promoted to mainline; v5 no longer kicks -> the kicking was an old-stack artifact.

  Change

  All four versions re-queued on hardware under one stack (same torque limits, slew profile, heading loop, logging), with the version-specific legacy profile pinned; verdicts held provisional until re-issued.

  Outcome

  The re-test design separated policy properties from stack artifacts before any policy was permanently written off - and turned each outcome into a specific conclusion via the pre-filled table.

  Mechanism

  A deployed behavior is produced by the policy plus everything between it and the motors (heading loop, slew limits, torque caps, clock); verdicts implicitly condition on that whole stack. Fixing the stack invalidates the conditioning, so old failures may be stack artifacts and old successes may not survive either.

  Applies when

  • deployment tooling (limits, filters, loops) changed since a policy was last judged
  • deciding which historical policy is the rightful baseline
  • a sim sweep contradicts an old hardware verdict

  “只有 v7 在完整的今日部署栈下上过真机 … v5"左右乱踢"、v6"未能自主"的判决全部来自更早的栈(--heading 尚不存在, 部分修复刚落地)——判决已过期。且 2026-08-02 四代同机仿真横测翻出了新证据:v6 在真机工况(cmd 0.15)下是四代里最健康的仿真档案”

• After installing the measured plant, re-run all generations paired on old and new plant - identity metrics carry verdicts, physics metrics re-baselineplant-swap-invariants-vs-shifts

  Mechanism understoodwalksim2sim-gatesim2simplant-calibrationgate-batteryattribution

  Treat every plant upgrade as an era boundary: re-run the retained policy set paired (same seeds/flags) on both plants, carry forward only verdicts whose metrics proved plant-invariant, re-baseline the rest - and mine the systematic shifts as measurements of the old plant's biases.

  Symptom

  With the plant finally fully measured (weighed masses 9.792 kg, bench-identified armature, in-situ friction), no historical sim number was comparable to new runs - "历史 sim 数字跨纪元不可比" - and it was unknown which historical verdicts still held.

  Context

  The era-2c cross-test ran all seven walk generations on the complete plant under one harness (14/14 survived), then re-ran the same 14 configurations on the OLD plant retrieved from git, same flags and seeds, with a self-check (one historical record reproduced digit-for-digit). The split was clean. Policy-identity metrics moved essentially zero across the plant swap - dominant frequency (v7's period-doubling 1.20 -> 1.20), knee amplitude (9.9 -> 10.0), foot distance (+/-2 mm), saturation (100 -> 100, 0 -> 0) - so all seven cross-generation verdicts (freeze signature, saturation-line closure, knee-collapse location, slip-penalty accounting, N2 lineage, v6's balance, v11's triad) were re-confirmed on the honest plant. Plant-physics metrics shifted systematically with ordering preserved: slip down 10-25% (measured friction makes ground-twisting costlier), landing vertical velocity down 15-50% ("旧 plant 高估落地 凶度"第二次独立证实), landing force mixed (mass up 2.2% vs friction braking the swing - two effects fighting). Exactly ONE behavior-level change: v8's low-speed period-doubling vanished (1.30 -> 2.50, lift normalizing) - confirming it had been machine-dependent bifurcation-edge behavior that armature+friction push off the knife edge, while v7's period-doubling stood untouched: saturation-freeze-driven, a policy property, not a numerical accident.

  Change

  Era re-baselining protocol: after any plant upgrade, one paired same-seed sweep of all retained generations on old and new plant; verdicts keyed to identity metrics carry over, thresholds re-read against the new-plant table, and the differences themselves become plant-physics findings.

  Outcome

  Seven verdicts survived with evidence rather than assumption; two causes of the period-doubling family were separated with plant-side proof; and the sim's landing-violence overestimate was independently confirmed a second time.

  Mechanism

  A policy's structural properties (frequencies, amplitudes, frozen joints) are functions of its weights and survive plant changes; contact-mediated quantities are joint properties of policy and plant and shift when the plant becomes honest. Pairing seeds across plants isolates the plant's contribution exactly, so the sweep both validates history and measures what the old plant had been lying about.

  Applies when

  • installing measured masses/armature/friction into the sim
  • historical thresholds are cited across a plant change
  • a hardware-only behavior might be bifurcation-edge sensitivity

  “策略身份指标逐位不动:主频(v7 1.20→1.20)、膝摆 … 这些是策略属性,plant 换代携带无损,历史定论因此全部成立。… 唯一行为级变化:v8@0.15 的倍周期消失(主频 1.30→2.50…)——印证当时"分岔边缘、机器相关"的判定:armature+摩擦把 v8 推离刀锋;v7 的倍周期纹丝不动(1.20→1.20),它是饱和冻结驱动的深层属性,不是数值巧合。”

• The deploy-side walk/recovery switch - into recovery at tilt > 65 deg held 0.3 s, back at tilt < 15 deg with angular rate < 1 rad/s and straight knees held 1 s, a 15 s timeout, last action cleared both ways - and the handoff steps the design required are only partly implementedwalk-recovery-fsm-handoff

  Observed oncerecoveryreal-deployreal-acceptancecontract-freezeprocess

  Specify a deploy-time controller switch as hysteretic, time-filtered predicates the robot can measure (proxy what it cannot, e.g. straight knees for height), a timeout that ends in a safe stop, and a complete handoff (history, clock, last action, command ramp) - then test that the code performs every handoff step, because the design document is not the implementation.

  Symptom

  With a recovery policy and a locomotion policy as separate networks, the robot needs a switch: when is it "fallen", when is it "up", and what state must be reset so the next policy does not act on the previous one's history.

  Context

  The 08-09 design: enter recovery when fallen (tilt > 55 deg or height < 0.60 x 0.384 m) for 150 ms, leave for a stand-hold when upright (tilt < 12 deg, height > 0.85 x 0.384 m, feet steady, |omega| < 0.8) for 400 ms - wide entry, strict exit, hysteresis - then a mandatory handoff trio before walking resumes (reset the walking policy's observation history, restart its phase clock at 0, clear its previous action and latency buffer) and a command ramp instead of a jump. The 08-14 implementation in deploy_policy (--recovery-policy): each policy under its own manifest contract (walk: nominal + scale; recovery: beta-anchored), the same rl_default gains, the tilt cutoff disabled; RECOVERY at tilt > 65 deg for 0.3 s; LOCO again at tilt < 15 deg and |omega| < 1 and knees straight (< 0.35 rad) for 1 s - the robot's computer has no height estimate, and straight knees stand in for height so a V3.0-style upright kneel cannot pass as standing; RECOVERY longer than 15 s ends in a safe stop; last_action cleared on both switches; command forced to 0 during RECOVERY; power scaling applies to LOCO only.

  Change

  An open account was written down with it: the recovery end state (0.355 m stance, hip yaw -/+27 deg) is outside the walking policy's training start distribution, so the first test must use stand / zero command as LOCO, and the long-term fix is to widen the walking policy's initial states rather than bend recovery's stance to suit walking.

  Outcome

  The spec records only a successful compile (py_compile); the hang test was left to be done on site. The operator runbook carries the three-step procedure (hang with stand as LOCO, mat and push, then omni walk as LOCO) but no outcome.

  Mechanism

  Two policies trained separately each assume their own history, clock and last action; a switch that carries any of them across feeds the next policy a state it never saw - the design called this "the walking policy seeing a ghost history".

  Conflicts

  The 08-09 design requires resetting history, clock and previous action plus a command ramp; the 08-14 implementation records last_action clearing and a zero command during recovery; the one-leg spec of 2026-09-14 lists the handoff hygiene as specified but not implemented - reset_history() is called by nothing (a 215-dim policy would carry four frames of pre-fall history), the phase clock is not zeroed, and there is no command ramp back to LOCO. No hardware run of the FSM is recorded in either source.

  Applies when

  • switching between separately trained policies on hardware
  • a policy with history or phase observations is re-enabled mid-run
  • the robot lacks a sensor the switching criterion was designed around

  “**判据**:进 RECOVERY = 倾角 >65°(`--fall-tilt-deg`)持续 0.3 s;回 LOCO = §5 真机可测子集:倾角 <15° ∧ |ω|<1 ∧ **膝直 <0.35 rad(NX 无高度观测, 高度门用膝直代理 —— 防 V3.0 型"跪坐但直立"误判)** 持续 1 s (`--recover-hold`);RECOVERY 单次 >15 s(`--recovery-max-time`)安全停。 … **切换卫生**:两向切换 last_action 清零;RECOVERY 态 cmd 强制 0”

• Ideal PD is not enough - add a delay buffer and fit armature/friction/delay per jointactuator-delay-buffer-fitting

  Observed oncewalkactuator-modelingactuator-modelingplant-calibration

  Never ship ideal PD to hardware: add a measured delay (in control steps) and per-joint armature/friction fitted from step and sine responses, and treat remaining actuator mismatch as your standing largest sim2real residual.

  Symptom

  Standard ideal PD actuator model transfers poorly; sim assumes targets take effect instantly and joints reach arbitrary acceleration.

  Context

  A developer with a successful on-hardware Isaac Lab biped modified the actuator model in two ways and calibrated it against the real robot: step-response plus sine-sweep tests (positive step, negative step, sine tracking), overlaying sim curves on measured curves and hand-tuning.

  Change

  (1) Delay buffer: action targets take effect after a uniform 6 time-step delay on all joints; (2) acceleration limiting so the actuator cannot reach arbitrary acceleration; (3) per-joint fit of armature / friction / delay - different joints genuinely needed different values.

  Outcome

  Hip joints fit worst, knee best; the developer rated the result "not perfect, the best I could do" and still listed actuator-model improvement as next work - i.e. even the fitted model remained the dominant residual.

  Mechanism

  Real actuation is a lagged, bandwidth-limited system; a delay buffer and acceleration cap are the two cheapest structures that reproduce its phase and magnitude response. Per-joint differences come from differing load, wiring, and friction states, so a single global constant underfits.

  Applies when

  • actuator model in sim is ideal PD with no delay
  • step-response of real joint visibly lags or overshoots the sim's
  • budgeting which sim2real gap to attack first

  “标准 ideal PD actuator 不够用，他改了两处：延迟缓冲：目标不是立即生效，全部关节统一 6 个 time step 延迟 / 加速度曲线：执行器不能瞬间达到任意加速度 … 用 armature / friction / delay 三个参数逐关节拟合，标定方法是阶跃响应 + 正弦扫描 … 髋部关节偏差最大，膝关节最好。”

• Cutting swing amplitude 40% raised yaw-momentum demand 53% - the falsified fix is recorded so nobody walks that road againamplitude-cut-falsified-yaw-fix

  Mechanism understoodwalksim-evalmeasurementattributionreward-shaping

  Test gait fixes against the quantity the ground must actually supply (torque/force rates vs friction ceilings), not against kinematic proxies; record falsified fixes with their mechanism so the search space shrinks permanently.

  Symptom

  Support-foot yaw slip stayed at ~223 deg (vs 225 deg) after walk_v6 cut joint swing amplitudes by ~40% (hip_pitch 20.6->10.4 deg, knee 31.3->18.8 deg) - the change built on the theory "smaller swing = less yaw momentum to dump into the ground".

  Context

  Direct measurement inverted the theory: yaw-momentum amplitude ROSE 16% (+/-0.1000 -> +/-0.1159) and its rate of change rose 53% (1.86 -> 2.84 N*m demanded from the ground), pinned exactly at the foot's supply ceiling (2.8-3.3 N*m at mu 0.6-0.7) - so slip could not drop. The extra demand lives in higher harmonics: v6's crisper foot placement (better clearance 34 mm, lower landing force) shortens the momentum- exchange window, concentrating the same exchange into less time. The verdict was written as a closed road: "下一轮不要再走这个方向". An honest residue was also booked: WHY amplitude down but momentum up 16% remained unresolved, with the named next step (per-rigid-body decomposition of H_z, since per-joint RMS sensitivity ignores phase correlations).

  Change

  The "reduce amplitude to reduce yaw momentum" lever was removed from the planning space; future yaw-slip work redirected toward the supply side (friction) and momentum-rate mechanics.

  Outcome

  Slip unchanged (225 -> 223 deg); the falsification and its mechanism became a permanent constraint on the fix search space.

  Mechanism

  Ground yaw torque demand scales with the rate of change of angular momentum, not its amplitude; kinematic amplitude cuts that also sharpen contact timing can raise dH/dt while lowering range. When demand exceeds the friction-limited supply ceiling, slip is set by the ceiling, so demand-side changes below the ceiling do nothing visible.

  Applies when

  • attacking foot slip or yaw drift via gait shape changes
  • a fix targets an amplitude while the constraint is a rate
  • documenting a failed intervention after a version comparison

  “walk_v6 | ±0.1159 (+16%) | 2.50 Hz | 2.84 N·m (+53%) … 脚的供给上限 2.8~3.3 N·m(μ 0.6~0.7)—— v6 正好顶在天花板上, 所以滑移一点没降。… 结论: "减小摆动幅度以降低偏航动量"这条被 v6 证伪 —— 砍 39% 幅度, 需求反升 53%。下一轮不要再走这个方向。”

• When the eval proxy has a known systematic bias, gate on within-proxy differences, not absolutesrelative-metrics-survive-proxy-bias

  Mechanism understoodwalkgate-batterygate-batterysim2simattribution

  Where the evaluator is known-biased, design gates as within-evaluator contrasts (left vs right, A vs B, pre vs post) that cancel common-mode error; reserve absolute thresholds for quantities whose proxy calibration has been checked.

  Symptom

  MuJoCo systematically overestimated yaw turn gain (1.58/2.45 where Isaac measured 1.04/1.02), and friction alignment recovered only part of the gap (mu 1.0 -> 0.6 pulled it to 1.43/2.27) - so any absolute turn-gain acceptance threshold in MuJoCo would be judging the proxy's bias, not the policy.

  Context

  The acceptance criterion was rewritten to use only the left/right difference of the turn gain (standard: <20%): both directions pass through the same biased proxy, so the bias largely cancels in the difference while the policy's chirality - the thing being gated - survives. The absolute-gain row was dropped: "转向只判左右差,不判绝对值". A parallel task was still opened to align MuJoCo contact parameters to Isaac's (mu, restitution), since drift proved highly friction-sensitive (straight-line drift -65 deg at mu 1.0 vs +1 deg at mu 0.4) - bias reduction and bias-robust metrics proceeded together.

  Change

  Gate metric changed from absolute turn gain to left-right gain difference; proxy-alignment work scheduled separately rather than blocking acceptance.

  Outcome

  Turn acceptance became meaningful across proxy versions (v5 70% -> v6 19% difference measured the real improvement) while the absolute bias question was pursued without holding the ladder hostage.

  Mechanism

  A systematic multiplicative or additive proxy bias applies to both arms of a mirrored measurement; differencing (or ratioing) mirrored conditions cancels the common-mode bias to first order, leaving the asymmetry signal. Metrics built this way remain valid while the proxy is imperfect - which it always is somewhere.

  Applies when

  • a sim proxy disagrees with the trainer or hardware in absolute terms
  • writing acceptance thresholds for direction-paired skills
  • proxy calibration work would otherwise block a ladder

  “转向只判左右差,不判绝对值 —— MuJoCo 的偏航增益系统性高估(实测 1.58/2.45 vs Isaac 1.04/1.02),摩擦只能解释一部分(μ 1.0→0.6 仅拉到 1.43/2.27)。差值是相对量。”

• Every new penalty ships with a pre-registered withdrawal clause - if healthy gait must pay above the cap, the term stands downcalibration-threshold-with-withdrawal-clause

  Replicatedwalkreward-shapingreward-shapingprocess

  Introduce every new penalty with: the zero-cost-option audit, a replay-calibrated weight formula (healthy pays a fixed small fraction of tracking), and a pre-registered withdrawal condition - and let the clause fire without argument when the calibration says the term cannot be afforded.

  Symptom

  Three same-shaped crashes had established a failure archetype: v4's clearance, v8a's landing window (weight off by 58x uncalibrated), and v6a's bare hip_yaw suppression all combined a zero-cost "don't move" option with a fee on any motion - a reverse barrier that pushes policies toward standing still.

  Context

  The v11 landing-window penalty was therefore introduced under a calibration-threshold protocol: (1) shape chosen with the window tightened (h_gate 0.03 -> 0.02, because 0.03 equaled the clearance target and priced the entire descent); (2) weight from a FORMULA, not judgment: measure the term's raw value on healthy replays (v5/v10b), set w = -(0.10-0.15 x tracking reward) / raw_healthy; (3) withdrawal clause pre-registered: if healthy gait must pay >15% of tracking no matter the tuning, the term is withdrawn to the next version rather than forced in - "不硬上". The companion hip_yaw quieting term ran the same protocol (calibrate on replays, healthy pays <=5%) and was later retired entirely when a structural fix (zero action scale) made its shaping tax unnecessary.

  Change

  Penalty introduction protocol: shape audit (what is the zero-cost option?), replay-based weight formula, healthy-pay cap with a written stand-down condition - all before training.

  Outcome

  The landing term was in fact withdrawn under its clause (v12 records "P5 落地窗口罚 已撤 … 维持撤下"), demonstrating the protocol firing as designed instead of the fourth same-type crash.

  Mechanism

  A penalty's damage mode is mispricing healthy behavior; since the healthy price is measurable in advance on replays, both the weight and the go/no-go decision can be computed rather than discovered by a ruined training run. The withdrawal clause converts "make it work" pressure into a clean deferral.

  Applies when

  • adding any motion-taxing penalty to a working gait
  • a proposed term's weight has no measurement behind it
  • a previous same-shaped term crashed training

  “权重公式而非拍脑袋:先在 v5/v10b 回放上量 h_gate=0.02 的原始值,w = −(0.10~0.15 × 跟踪奖励) / raw_健康;标定门槛:若健康步态无论如何要付 >15% 跟踪,本项撤下留 v12,不硬上 (v4 clearance/v8a-B/v6a 三次同型翻车的教训:代价为零的"不动"选项 + 一动就收费 = 反向壁垒)。”

• The real robot's right-leg kicking was over-trained-delay times loop gain - irreducible pipeline latency is plant, model it fully from day onepipeline-latency-is-plant-not-dr

  Mechanism understoodomniactuator-modelingactuator-modelingreal-acceptanceattributionsim2sim

  Measure the end-to-end action pipeline delay and build it into the nominal plant and every acceptance gate from day one; treat power/scale deratings that "fix" oscillation as gain-reduction crutches flagging an unmodeled delay, and expect higher-feedback-gain policies to be MORE delay-fragile.

  Symptom

  On hardware, s1c/s1d at action scale 1.0 always kicked wildly with the right leg (s1c only ran as SOTA at power 0.8; s1d only at 0.7) - while sim showed nothing under default evaluation.

  Context

  Sim reproduced the incident item by item once the real pipeline delay was injected: s1d@1.0 with --delay 1 fell at 10.2 s, --delay 2 at 5.2 s; s1c@1.0 stressed (r_hip_roll saturation 5 -> 16%; "右脚" = the policy's chirality makes the right leg its high-gain leg); and the combos that worked on hardware (s1c@0.8+delay2, s1d@0.7+delay2) all survived in sim. Mechanism: the real pipeline is ~1-2 ticks (BusWorker next-cycle pickup + CAN round trip) but S1.1 trained only to 1 tick - "超训延迟 × 全环路增益 = 振荡;衰减 = 压环路增益换稳定" (delay beyond training x full loop gain = oscillation; the power derating had been buying stability by compressing loop gain). s1d was MORE fragile than s1c because its yaw 3-layer stack had learned higher feedback gain - higher gain, lower delay tolerance. Three changes: latency DR widened to cover reality; acceptance gates and smoke runs moved permanently to --delay 2 ("门必须在真机条件下预测 真机"); and the doctrine written twice-paid: "不可约的管线属性(延迟、 限速)不是'随机化选项',是 plant 本体,第一天就该全额建模" - S1's nominal-then-robust staging falsified by hardware for the second time. The later s1e hardware run at power 1.0 (no kicking, normal force) closed the loop: "0.8 = 旧代拐杖" - the derating had been a crutch for the under-modeled delay, not a real requirement.

  Change

  Latency modeled as plant from day one of any lineage (measured 1-2 ticks covered, bridge-layer rate limits likewise modeled by default); every gate and smoke evaluation issued under --delay 2.

  Outcome

  Kicking reproduced, explained, and eliminated in the s1e generation at full scale and full power; the deploy-side crutches (0.7/0.8) retired for the new lineage.

  Mechanism

  Feedback oscillation onset is a product of loop gain and phase lag; a policy trained below the real delay learns gains that sit past the real stability margin, and any output derating masks it by scaling gain down. Since pipeline delay is deterministic hardware property - not an uncertainty - it belongs in the nominal plant, and every evaluation must include it or the gate predicts a robot that does not exist.

  Applies when

  • hardware oscillation/kicking that sim only reproduces with added delay
  • a policy only runs on hardware at reduced power/scale
  • defining what belongs in the nominal plant vs the DR list

  “真实链路延迟 ~1~2 拍 … S1.1 只训到 1 拍——超训延迟 × 全环路增益 = 振荡;衰减 = 压环路增益换稳定。s1d 比 s1c 更脆 = yaw 三层栈学出更高反馈增益,增益越高延迟容忍越低。… 教训入账:S1「先标称后鲁棒」第二次被真机证伪——不可约的管线属性(延迟、限速)不是"随机化选项",是 plant 本体,第一天就该全额建模。”

• Choose the fork root by which candidate's shortfalls are recoverable, not by headline scorefork-root-recoverable-shortfall

  Mechanism understoodomnifork-selectionfork-selectionprocess

  When picking a checkpoint to fork from, rank candidates by whether their weaknesses are trainable-back, not by current headline metrics; prefer the candidate whose deficits the upcoming training directly pays for.

  Symptom

  Multiple candidate checkpoints for the omni-command ladder root, each best at something different: fric-3000 had the best tracking precision (vx 88-91%) and hardened plant robustness; s1e-500 had lower precision (vx 82%) but was the only candidate that could still walk backward.

  Context

  Root selection ran as a data probe, not a preference vote: 6 candidates x 8 out-of-distribution omni commands x 20 seeds = 960 cells (probe_omni_0808.json). s1e-500 @pw1.0 survived 20/20 in all eight conditions including backward at 67% tracking; the deep-trained fric lineage scored backward 0-3/20 despite better forward precision.

  Change

  Decision criterion made explicit: list what each candidate exclusively wins at, then ask which of those wins the loser could train back. fric-3000's exclusive wins (precision, plant robustness) are both retrainable - precision is directly optimized by the reward, plant hardening is a planned later pass. s1e-500's exclusive wins (backward plasticity 20/20 vs 2/20, disturbance margin 159/160 vs 125/160, push chirality symmetry 40/40 vs 17/40) had all been shown unrecoverable - push-level rungs failed twice, chirality never recovered even with mirror augmentation on. Root = s1e-500.

  Outcome

  s1e-500 carried the whole C ladder; its backward skill was preserved through C2/C4 gates (regress budget <=2/20 enforced), and the final C4 product passed a 260-cell battery at 20/20 everywhere.

  Mechanism

  Training can re-earn anything the objective directly pays for, but capabilities that earlier training destroyed and never restored (plasticity, symmetry, robustness margins) are empirically one-way doors. The information-bearing comparison is therefore recoverability of each candidate's deficit, which the team stated as "独占项的可恢复性正好相反 —— 这就是判据" (the exclusive items' recoverability is exactly opposite - that is the criterion).

  Applies when

  • selecting a resume/fork root among several checkpoints
  • one candidate is more precise but another retains a skill the rest lost
  • planning a task-extension ladder from an existing lineage

  “fric-3000 赢在精度（vx 88~91%…）与 plant 鲁棒性 → 两样都训得回来…；s1e-500 赢在可塑性（C1 20/20 vs 2/20）、抗扰余量（159/160 vs 125/160）、手性对称（推 ±6 N·s 40/40 vs 17/40）→ 三样都训不回来 … 独占项的可恢复性正好相反 —— 这就是判据。”

• The walking lines' safety setting, power-scale 0.8, broke the recovery policy's full-range contract - it cut the ends of the joint travel (4/50 could not get up) and left the torque spikes untouched; a kp x 0.9 gain profile inside the trained kp band did the jobpower-derating-cuts-full-range-contract

  Observed oncerecoveryreal-deployreal-acceptanceactuator-modelingcontract-freeze

  A deployment derating knob means something only relative to the action contract: before reusing a line's "safe setting" on a new skill, check what it does to that skill's reachable range and to the term that makes the spikes, prefer a gain change inside the band the policy was randomized over, verify it in simulation, and re-decide when the contract changes.

  Symptom

  After the violent first real get-up (2026-08-09), the recovery policy needed a gentler setting for its next hardware test, and the walking and omni lines' standard derating - deploying at power-scale 0.8 - was the obvious candidate.

  Context

  The V0 recovery contract maps actions to absolute targets over the full joint range: a = +/-1 lands exactly on the URDF limits, and standing puts the knee at the clip. Candidates were compared on R3.1 in MuJoCo (5 categories x 10 seeds) on 2026-08-10 before any hardware time was spent.

  Change

  A new gain profile, rl_kp090 (kp x 0.9, kd unchanged), recorded in robot.yaml as the recovery hardware-test setting, with power-scale 0.8 explicitly banned for recovery.

  Outcome

  kp x 0.9: 48/50 got up; median torque demand on hip_pitch/knee fell from 120-125% to 100-104% of the deployment limit; leg-leg contact frames 2,152 -> 1,095; the change sits inside the +/-10% kp randomization the policy trained with. power-scale 0.8: 4/50 could not get up, because under the full-range contract it removes the ends of the travel (the deep squat's tucked legs, the straight standing knee), and the torque spikes (kp x error) did not fall at all. When the line moved to the beta-anchored contract, rl_kp090 was declared a V0-era choice that does not fit (beta is calibrated at kp 30) and deployment returned to rl_default; the deploy switch applies power scaling to the walking side only.

  Mechanism

  A power scale multiplies the action, which under an absolute full-range mapping shrinks the reachable workspace instead of softening the actuator; the spikes come from the proportional term on large errors, which only a gain change reduces - and a gain change inside the trained randomization band stays in distribution.

  Conflicts

  The undated operator runbook still carries an R3.1 "B comparison" command at power-scale 0.8 beside the rl_default baseline; the sources do not say whether it was written before the ban or was ever run.

  Applies when

  • reusing a power, torque or action scale from one skill on another
  • a policy whose actions map to absolute targets over the full joint range
  • choosing a gentler setting for a first or second hardware trial

  “kp×0.9 / kd 不动 —— recovery_r3_1 成功 48/50, τ 需求中位 hip_pitch/knee 120~125% -> 100~104% 部署限, 腿-腿接触 2152 -> 1095 帧; ±10% 在训练 kp DR 带内. ⚠️ power-scale 0.8 对 recovery **禁用**: 全 ROM 契约下 0.8 砍的是行程 端点 (深蹲收腿/站直够不到), 实测 4/50 起不来, 且尖峰 (kp·err) 一点不降 —— 它是 walk/omni 的安全档, 不是 recovery 的.”

• Push DR helped one lineage and hurt another at the same dose - robustness budget is conserved and gets borrowed, not createdpush-dr-conditional-budget-conservation

  Replicatedomnidr-tuningdomain-randomizationcurriculumattribution

  Before opening a disturbance-DR rung, measure whether the untrained policy already meets the spec; if training it anyway, expect the benefit to be conditional on the lineage's existing DR load, grade the intensity, and audit retained margins - budget spent elsewhere will be borrowed back.

  Symptom

  The push rung's outcome flipped with the lineage: direct +/-0.6 m/s push failed outright on first attempt (base walking collapsed - kd1.2 scan 0/3 from iter 3300, sim2sim self-falls with pushes OFF - no PASS point existed); staged +/-0.3 then gave the narrow-kd single-working-point lineage real gains (push survival 1/5 -> 4/5) while the SAME dose made the dual-working-point balanced-band lineage WORSE (20-seed survival 18 -> 12/20 plus across-the-board push regression).

  Context

  The four-ladder verdict ("四梯定案", s2e/s2f at both intensities) named the pattern: "push DR 收益条件性" - the benefit is conditional on how much robustness budget the lineage has already spent. The law candidate: "DR 总预算守恒, 平衡带鲁棒性从抗扰余量借" - total DR budget is conserved; a lineage already covering a wide plant band pays for push tolerance out of its disturbance margin. Both S2 ladders therefore closed at the friction rung, with the decisive numerator: untrained push tolerance already met the 4-6 N*s requirement, so the rung was not needed at all ("⑥ push 不训(收益条件性,免训 ±0.6 已达 标)"). The same accounting later justified the C-before-S2 ordering ("push/μ 两轮已实证 DR 预算有限且会被重分配") and trimmed the second S2 pass to three rungs.

  Change

  Push removed from the standing ladder; graded intensity retained as the method IF a lineage ever needs push training; "does the untrained policy already meet the disturbance spec" instituted as the first check before opening any disturbance rung.

  Outcome

  Two rungs (push, ground mu) deleted from the second S2 pass on measured grounds; the ladder's real yield was re-stated honestly as precision, not robustness (speed gate 0 -> 20/20, zero-command drift 0.98 -> 0.06 m, but push 159 -> 125/160).

  Mechanism

  A fixed-capacity policy allocates representation and margin across the training distribution; adding a disturbance axis to a lineage that already spans a wide plant family forces reallocation - the new tolerance is bought with existing margins. Lineages with narrow plant coverage have free budget, so the identical DR dose lands as gain. Benefit is a property of (dose x lineage state), never of the dose alone.

  Applies when

  • proposing push/perturbation training on a hardened lineage
  • the same DR rung helped one lineage and hurt another
  • accounting where a ladder's robustness gains actually came from

  “push DR 收益条件性 —— s2e⑥a (单工作点血统 kd 窄带) ±0.3 得抗推 1/5→4/5; s2f⑥ (双工作点平衡带血统) 同档反而 20-seed 存活 18→12/20 且抗推全面倒退。规律候选: DR 总预算守恒, 平衡带鲁棒性从抗扰余量借。两阶梯均以 ⑤ 摩擦级收官 … 抗推 4~6 N·s 免训已达标。”

• Freeze the deployment contract, stamp every export, and let an automated checker catch wiring bugscontract-freeze-and-checker

  Replicatedomniprocesscontract-freezeprocesssim2sim

  Freeze and fingerprint the policy I/O contract; ship contract changes as new versioned profiles that leave old artifacts bit-identical; and extend the automated contract checker with every pipeline change, forcing the new path to execute in the check.

  Symptom

  Contract-level changes (observation layout, action pipeline) are where silent sim/real divergence is born; two real wiring bugs appeared the one time the action pipeline was extended.

  Context

  The 215-dim observation contract was frozen ("纪元 3，三机 digest" - an era number plus a digest agreed across three machines); proposals that would break it (e.g. a GRU memory) were rejected on contract grounds. Every exported ONNX is stamped and verified with a manifest (onnx_manifest --stamp / --verify), and deployment refuses mismatched combinations. When C4 added the lateral feed-forward, it went in as a NEW profile (omni_ff) leaving the existing omni profile's behavior bit-identical; the checker (check_contract) was extended to force the feed-forward path to actually execute (cmd_vy=0.13) and promptly caught two genuine bugs: (1) re-clamping with soft_joint_pos_limits after the feed-forward (0.23 rad deviation) instead of reusing the parent's clip; (2) indexing processed actions by asset.joint_names instead of the action term's own contract-ordered _joint_names, which landed the feed-forward on the wrong joints (l_hip_yaw / r_ankle_pitch).

  Change

  Contract discipline as implemented: frozen dims + digest; manifest stamping and refusal; contract changes only via new versioned profiles; checker updated in the same commit as any pipeline change, with inputs chosen so new code paths are exercised.

  Outcome

  Both wiring bugs caught before any training or deployment ("两个都是 check_contract 当场抓出来的 —— 这次它值回票价"); old deployments provably unaffected by the new profile.

  Mechanism

  The contract is the only interface the policy and robot share; freezing plus fingerprinting makes divergence detectable, and an executable checker turns "the contract holds" from a belief into a test - but only if its inputs actually drive the new code path.

  Applies when

  • modifying the action or observation pipeline of a deployed policy
  • exporting policies for hardware
  • proposals that would change observation dims or history structure

  “契约校验抓到的两个真错误（记账，别再犯）：1. 前馈后误用 soft_joint_pos_limits（URDF 限位 ×0.9）重钳 → 0.23 rad 偏差 … 2. 用 asset.joint_names 索引 _processed_actions → 前馈落到 l_hip_yaw/r_ankle_pitch 上 … 两个都是 check_contract 当场抓出来的 —— 这次它值回票价。”

• Pre-register the ladder's risks and how each future result will be read - before trainingpreregister-risks-and-fork-readings

  Replicatedomniprocessprocess

  Before a training ladder or risky rung, write the risks, the stop rules, and how every plausible outcome will be interpreted - then do not edit them after seeing results.

  Symptom

  Without pre-registration, ladder results get rationalized after the fact; the team had already seen post-hoc reads go wrong and adopted written pre-commitment.

  Context

  The C-ladder execution sheet opens with three numbered pre-registered risks: (1) S2 plant robustness will not carry into omni - a full S2 redo is budgeted from the start; (2) the s1e recipe has a collapse valley at iter 1500+ (recorded twice), so every rung runs a watch_ckpt --every 100 smoke loop with stop-on-degradation; (3) the root's OOD survival edge may partly be "it is slower / commits less" - with the reading fixed in advance: if C1 training raises tracking while survival drops, the edge was bought with slowness, and root selection reopens. Later rungs went further, pre-registering a full result-to-conclusion table for the A/B arms ("预注册读法（事后不改）") and even pre-registering the author's own doubt that a level would fail and what its failure would prove.

  Change

  Standing practice: before each rung, write down (a) known risks with their mitigations, (b) the interpretation of each possible outcome, (c) stop criteria - all frozen before the run starts ("开训前写死，事后不许改").

  Outcome

  When arm-A/arm-B and redo results arrived, conclusions were read off the pre-registered table instead of argued; a predicted-likely-FAIL level (C4-redo3) was still run because its pre-registered value was eliminating the regularization hypothesis - which it did.

  Mechanism

  Pre-commitment converts each training run into a decisive experiment: outcomes falsify or confirm named hypotheses instead of being absorbed into a story; it also makes negative results valuable (a FAIL that eliminates a hypothesis advances the search).

  Applies when

  • launching a multi-rung training ladder
  • running an A/B fork whose outcome will drive a fork/root decision
  • a rung is expected to fail but is run for its diagnostic value

  “三条预注册风险 … 若 C1 训后跟踪提上去而存活掉下来，说明这条优势是速度买的、不是通用性 → 那时重开选根。”

• Under continuous 3-axis uniform sampling, pure straight-line walking is a zero-measure event the policy never trainedzero-measure-commands-need-mode-sampling

  Mechanism understoodomnicurriculumcurriculumobservation-honestygate-battery

  Enumerate the exact command points users will actually issue (straight, stop, in-place turn) and give each explicit probability mass via mode sampling with off-axes pinned to zero - never assume a continuous sampler covers its measure-zero subsets.

  Symptom

  "The robot drifts even in sim when told to walk straight" persisted across reward tunings - because with commands drawn as vx in [0.15,0.5] x vy ~ U(+/-0.2) x wz ~ U(+/-0.6), the event vy=0 AND wz=0 has probability zero: pure straight-line walking was never sampled even once.

  Context

  Restart evidence item #3: "纯直行是零测度点 … 'sim 里直行就漂'是分布的 必然,不是 reward 没调好" - the drift metric was legitimately drowned by commanded turning (v11's own comment self-documented this). The structural fix is discrete mode sampling: a custom ModeVelocityCommand that first draws a mode by share (stand/forward/back/turn/side/mixed), then draws values only on that mode's axes with all others pinned to exact zero - which is also what preserves single-variable discipline in the C ladder (native 3-axis uniform "采不出'离散模式桶' … 把 C1~C4 的单变量纪律直接毁掉"). The mixed mode later got an ellipsoid constraint rather than a cube for the same reason in reverse - corner combinations of a cube are unrepresentative extremes.

  Change

  Command generation moved from independent per-axis uniforms to mode-bucket sampling with pinned-zero off-axes (plus 20% rel_standing); acceptance likewise evaluates per mode.

  Outcome

  Straight-line behavior became a trained, testable mode instead of a measure-zero hope; the C ladder could add one mode per rung with provable isolation.

  Mechanism

  A policy optimizes expected reward under the command distribution; events of probability zero contribute nothing to the objective, so exact-zero-command behaviors (straight walk, stand, in-place turn) are only learned if the sampler gives them mass. Product-of-uniforms distributions concentrate mass on mixtures and give none to the pure behaviors users actually command.

  Applies when

  • a "simple" command (straight, stop) underperforms mixtures in sim
  • designing command distributions for velocity-tracking tasks
  • a ladder needs per-mode isolation for attribution

  “纯直行是零测度点:最终 command 为 vx∈[0.15,0.5] × vy∈U(±0.2) × wz∈U(±0.6) 连续均匀,vy=0∧wz=0 从未被专门采样 —— "sim 里直行就漂"是分布的必然,不是 reward 没调好 … Isaac 原生 UniformVelocityCommand 是三轴各自 uniform,采不出"离散模式桶"”

• Every gate on a penalty is an exit - to stop paying a stance tax the policy parked 2 deg outside a 30 deg uprightness gate (lunging), and, from scratch, just under a height gate (crouching); a positive band and an always-on guard fixed bothpenalty-gate-is-an-escape-hatch

  Replicatedrecoveryreward-shapingreward-shapinggate-battery

  Never gate a penalty on a state the policy can leave by getting worse; use always-on guards for what must never happen and positive, gated bands for what you want, and count every gate on a penalty as one more escape route to check in the logs.

  Symptom

  V2.9 added stance_width_task = relu(0.34 m - foot spacing) x standing gates, weight -10. Three checkpoints scored 0% on acceptance: standing height reached, feet on the ground, angular rate low, but the torso leaned 32.5/32.3/31.9 deg in a fore-aft lunge. The training dashboard read "tax paid off, base_height at full value".

  Context

  The penalty was gated by uprightness (tilt < 30 deg) and standing height; its tax had no time gate (500 steps x -1.65) while the standing income sat behind a 3 s zero gate (~325 steps), so leaning just past 30 deg lost a little gated income and saved the whole tax. base_height has no upright gate, so the lunge still collected it. The first metric also measured full horizontal spacing, so a staggered lunge counted as "wide".

  Change

  Two laws written down: a penalty may only carry gates the policy cannot escape by getting worse (make it an always-on guard) or it becomes a positive band ("not earned" is not "escaped"); and width is measured laterally in the base yaw frame. From scratch (V3.1 P1) with the lateral metric but the same gates, the policy parked just under the height gate instead (base_height 1.176/1.5, h ~ 0.30 m against a 0.3264 gate), the beta curriculum never advanced in 1,700 iterations, and the run was stopped early. P1b flipped the penalty into a positive band +2.0 x clamp(lateral / 0.34) x standing gates; P1c added yaw_guard = -5 x relu(|hip_yaw| - 30 deg), always on, no gate, no exemption.

  Outcome

  P1b: lateral stance 0.364 m, all four categories 100%, MuJoCo mu 1.0/0.4 both 100%. P1c: all six acceptance criteria passed for the first time on the line (hip-yaw saturation 1.2%), the guard's tax converging to -0.016 (almost never touched).

  Mechanism

  A gated tax that is not paid is saved, so the policy moves to the cheapest state just outside the gate; a gated income that is not earned is simply lost, so a positive band has no exit. HoST's style penalties are ungated or binary - the same law seen from the other side.

  Applies when

  • adding a penalty multiplied by an uprightness, height, phase or contact gate
  • a policy settles just beyond a gate threshold
  • training metrics look paid-up while acceptance collapses

  “**罚项的门 = 策略的逃生门**。带直立门的负项可以靠"变得更差"(倾出门外) 全时免税;HoST 的 style 罚全部无门控/二值恰是同一律的反面实证。修律: 负项只许挂"变差逃不掉"的门(上限护栏 always-on),或改正向 band (收不到 ≠ 逃掉)。”

• Tightening the bridge's rate limiter under an unchanged policy cut torque peaks 30-50% and made other things worse - the policy cannot see the limiter, keeps commanding and winds up; a deploy-side limiter is a safety net, not a curedeploy-rate-limiter-windup

  Mechanism understoodrecoverysim2sim-gateactuator-modelingsim2simreal-acceptance

  A rate or torque limiter added at deployment lowers peaks but the policy still commands as if unconstrained (saturation, windup, new contacts); use it as a safety net mirrored in evaluation, and put the constraint where the policy can learn around it.

  Symptom

  After the violent first real-robot get-up, the cheapest candidate fix was to tighten the bridge's slew (rate) limit for the recovery policy without retraining.

  Context

  Probe on R3.1 in MuJoCo (5 categories x 3 seeds, mu 1.0), monkeypatching the limiter with no repository change: TIGHT = RS06 4.0 / RS02 3.0 / RS00 2.0 rad/s (about 0.08/0.06/0.04 rad per policy step) against the current vel_limit setting.

  Change

  The probe decided the role of the limiter rather than a deployment.

  Outcome

  Success 14/15 -> 12/15; get-up median 2.35 -> 3.53 s (max 9.30); torque demand peak median hip_pitch 164% -> 111%, knee 166% -> 86%; action saturation still 100%; leg-leg contact 558 -> 860 frames. The limiter was kept only as a real-robot safety net (mirrored into sim2sim evaluation); the cure moved into training - where the next lesson was that a limiter anchored on the last command is itself an integrator (slew-anchor-is-an-integrator).

  Mechanism

  A policy that never trained with the limiter keeps issuing the targets it learned; the limiter clips them, the target window runs ahead (windup), and the robot follows a trajectory the policy never evaluated.

  Applies when

  • a trained policy is too violent on hardware and a quick deploy-side fix is tempting
  • adding slew, torque or velocity limits in a bridge or firmware
  • evaluation and deployment use different limiter settings

  “判读:**链路侧收紧立等可取地把 τ 峰值砍 30~50%,但成功率掉、饱和率仍 100%、 腿-腿接触反升** —— 策略感知不到限速器,目标窗口继续狂奔。⇒ 收紧 slew 只配当 **真机侧安全网**(必须同步进 sim2sim 口径,基础设施现成),**不配当治法; 治法必须进训练**。”

• Prone get-up sat at 0/159 until two gated hinge terms moved the seated feet - first sideways (561 -> 360 mm), then fore-aft (-168 -> +56 mm) - and success went to 158/159 with nothing else changedprone-dead-end-is-foot-placement

  Mechanism understoodrecoveryreward-shapingreward-shapingattributioncurriculum

  When a stuck state and a successful state differ geometrically, penalize the discriminating quantity with a gated hinge that is exactly zero in the state the policy actually reaches (measure it - not the nominal), then re-probe: flattening one axis can move the discriminant to another.

  Symptom

  Prone falls always righted and then sat with the feet splayed wide or tucked behind the hips, from where the policy never stood (0% for four generations).

  Context

  Four lines of evidence pointed at foot position: the configuration probe (ankles 215 mm apart stood 52.3%, 561 mm apart 0.0%); FK showing the action contract's nominal (a = 0) is itself a 465 mm straddle, so the action_rate and still terms were pulling toward the splits; biomechanics (feet tucked under the body cut peak hip-extension torque 148.8 -> 32.7 N*m, -78%); and HoST's foot-displacement term, which this reward table lacked. The earlier "not a reward hole" reading was corrected to "a gradient hole, not a level hole": at the dead point the heaviest term (upright) was saturated with zero gradient, still paid for not moving, and the one live gradient (base_height) pointed at the thigh-horizontal torque barrier. A prone ROM scan had already ruled out pushing up from prone.

  Change

  R0.4: feet_spread_excess = clamp(ankle distance - 0.215, 0, inf) x upright gate, weight -2.0, plus a height-decay factor added after measuring that the policy's real standing stance was 406 mm, not the 215 mm nominal (the plain version would have taxed every successful stand 0.38/s). R0.5: the same shape on the fore-aft axis, feet_fore_seated = |fore-aft offset - 0.05| x upright gate x height decay, target +50 mm (the measured natural offset of standing postures). One variable per rung.

  Outcome

  R0.4: seated ankle distance 561 -> 360 mm, supine/side exactly unchanged, prone 0 -> 1.9%, mid 45.9 -> 62.2%; a probe then showed the discriminant had moved to the fore-aft axis (standing starts +42 to +51 mm, the prone seat -168 mm). R0.5: supine 99.4, prone 99.4, side 100, mid 100%, re-falls 0%; both geometry terms collapsed to ~0 near iteration 13,100 as base_height rose, and the prone fore-aft offset went -168 -> +56 mm - the term's own target, closing the causal chain. The cost, unmeasured at the time: action jitter rose 33% (sum |da|^2 6.82 -> 9.06).

  Mechanism

  An upright-gated hinge is inert while the robot rolls and exactly zero in the achieved stance, so it adds gradient only inside the stuck basin; a seated robot with its feet behind or outside its COM must make a kinematically unfavourable transition to stand, and moving the feet under the body removes it.

  Applies when

  • a get-up or transition skill fails from one start category only
  • successful and failed episodes differ in a measurable geometric quantity
  • a shaping term might tax the posture successful episodes already use

  “`recovery_r0_5`,唯一变量 = 追加 `feet_fore_seated`(与 R0.4 同形状,只换测量轴)。 … 对照 R0.4 的 prone(3.1%,360 mm,**−168 mm**):前后偏移从 −168 走到 +56, 正是这一项的目标量,**判别量被消掉后成功率随之到顶** —— 因果链完整。”

• Late training leaned on sampling noise as a stability crutch - deterministic play collapsed while training metrics stayed greennoise-crutch-deterministic-collapse

  Replicatedomnitraining-runsim2simprocess

  Evaluate the deterministic policy in an external harness on a fixed cadence during training (not just at the end), select checkpoints on that curve, and treat a collapsing noise_std with rising training reward as a warning that noise is load-bearing.

  Symptom

  omni_s1's final checkpoint (model_5999) fell at 4 s even in Isaac's OWN deterministic play, while checkpoints from iter 1700-4000 were fine - and no training metric flagged anything. Policy noise_std had collapsed to 0.045 by iter ~990 (final 0.033).

  Context

  Diagnosis: the policy had learned to use its exploration noise as a dither/stabilizer - "策略把采样噪声当稳定拐杆,训练指标看不见" (the training metrics cannot see it, because training always runs with noise on). Countermeasures: entropy_coef 0.005 -> 0.01 to slow the std collapse, and - the structural fix - an in-training smoke loop (watch_ckpt.py): every 500 iters, export ONNX directly, run 3-seed MuJoCo evaluation, log CSV/TensorBoard curves plus three-view videos. The doctrine line was written in bold: "训练指标全绿不再是发育健康的 证据,冒烟曲线才是" - green training metrics are no longer evidence of healthy development; the smoke curve is. The follow-up run s1b showed the drift metric follow a U-shape (73 -> 8.6 at iter 3500 -> 76), making checkpoint selection BY the smoke curve (early stop at 3500) the shipping mechanism, with terminal re-degradation booked as known and unresolved.

  Change

  entropy floor raised; watch_ckpt smoke loop instituted as standing infrastructure; checkpoint selection moved from "last iteration" to "best point on the deterministic smoke curve".

  Outcome

  s1b shipped from iter 3500 (the U-bottom) instead of a degraded terminus; every later lineage (s1c/s1e, the C ladder's --every 100 loops) inherited the watcher as the standard guardrail.

  Mechanism

  PPO evaluates and improves the stochastic policy; if noise itself stabilizes the gait (dither smoothing a marginal limit cycle), the deterministic mean policy is a different, worse controller that training never measures. External deterministic evaluation on an independent simulator is the only readout of what will actually be deployed.

  Applies when

  • final checkpoints underperform mid-training ones
  • noise_std collapses early while training reward climbs
  • deciding which checkpoint to export and ship

  “训练后期确定性脆化——noise_std iter~990 收到 0.045(终 0.033),model_5999 连 Isaac 确定性 play 都 4 s 摔(1700~4000 正常):策略把采样噪声当稳定拐杖,训练指标看不见。对策:entropy_coef 0.005→0.01 + train/watch_ckpt.py 训练中冒烟曲线 … 训练指标全绿不再是发育健康的证据,冒烟曲线才是。”

• Continuing a converged policy on a change that carried no new gradient drifted its transfer from 100/98% to 80/28% over 3,000 iterations while every Isaac gate stayed perfect - scan every checkpoint on the second simulator's friction axisconverged-continuation-is-poison

  Observed oncerecoverytraining-runfork-selectionsim2simcurriculum

  Before continuing a converged policy, check that the change creates a live gradient; if it does not, cap the budget at a few hundred iterations, and in every continuation scan each checkpoint on the second simulator's transfer axis (for example low friction) - trainer-side gates can stay perfect while transfer decays.

  Symptom

  V2.7-A (swap the flat_feet term for a compensated version, continue from v2_6c) finished with the line's best Isaac score (100%) and a MuJoCo transfer collapse: mu 1.0 98 -> 80%, mu 0.4 98 -> 28%; the stance it was meant to widen had not moved.

  Context

  The new term's calibration run showed a near-zero tax from the start: the policy already satisfied it, so the reward landscape offered nothing new. A checkpoint scan on MuJoCo mu {1.0, 0.4} located the damage: +100 iterations 100/98% (better than the baseline), then 86/54, 60/38, 80/28 - monotonic decay with training length, while entropy and action noise rose (7.77 -> 8.18, 0.588 -> 0.612): drift, not sharpening.

  Change

  Rule written in: with no new gradient, a continuation budget is short (at most a few hundred iterations) and the MuJoCo transfer axis enters every checkpoint scan. The next rung (V2.7b, a live stance-width gradient) was budgeted at 1,000 iterations with mu {1.0, 0.4} scans every 100 and a stop-on-signal rule.

  Outcome

  V2.7b kept transfer at the same depth (mu 1.0 98% / mu 0.4 92% at +1,000, where A had already rotted to 86/54) and at +3,000 (100/96%): a live gradient preserved transfer. V2.8 then broke that pattern (mu 0.4 2%): the gradient must also be compatible with the policy's existing form.

  Mechanism

  On a converged reward landscape PPO keeps updating without a signal to follow, and the random walk is pulled toward whatever the training plant rewards idiosyncratically - invisible in the trainer's own gates.

  Conflicts

  The drift mechanism is the spec's reading of one decay series plus one contrasting run; V2.8 is recorded as an exception to "live gradient keeps transfer".

  Applies when

  • fine-tuning a converged policy with a small reward change
  • a continuation run's trainer-side metrics improve while real or cross-sim results worsen
  • choosing which checkpoint of a continuation to ship

  “**checkpoint 扫定死因**(μ1.0/μ0.4):**29500(+100 iter)= 100/98%** (优于基线!)→ 30400 = 86/54 → 31400 = 60/38 → 32398 = 80/28 —— **迁移随续训长度单调衰减**。 … **教训入库:收敛均衡上的长续训是毒药 —— 无新梯度时 续训预算须短(≲数百 iter),且 MuJoCo 迁移轴必须进 checkpoint 扫描。**”

• Fix the task first, harden the plant second - DR budget spent on a dying task is wastedtask-shaping-before-plant-hardening

  Mechanism understoodomniprocessdomain-randomizationprocesscurriculum

  Freeze the task/command distribution before spending DR budget on plant robustness; if the task will still change, schedule plant hardening as a final pass and book the interim robustness gap explicitly.

  Symptom

  Tempting default ordering was to keep the plant-hardened (S2) lineage and teach it new commands; but the S2 plant adaptation had been earned on the straight-walk task, and the new omni tasks (sidewalk, in-place turn) use completely different contact patterns.

  Context

  The team had direct evidence that DR robustness is a budget that gets reallocated when the data distribution changes ("push/μ 两轮已实证 DR 预算有限且会被重分配") - robustness trained under one task/command distribution does not persist when training continues under another.

  Change

  Ladder order set to: first C (task shaping - add command modes until the task family is final), then a second S2 pass (plant hardening) on the C product. The plant-robustness gap this creates mid-ladder is accepted and booked explicitly ("此处不欠账" - the debt is assigned to the second S2 pass, not denied).

  Outcome

  The first S2 pass was not wasted: its laws (kd bandwidth <-> low mu, push need not be trained, ground mu need not be trained, bistability) let the second pass drop from five rungs to three. The C ladder itself ran on the softer plant band without incident.

  Mechanism

  DR robustness is carried by the policy's visited-state distribution; changing the task changes that distribution, so robustness bought under the old task partially dissolves. Hardening before the task is final means paying for robustness on states that will no longer be visited - "给一个即将不存在的任务花预算" (spending budget on a soon-to-not-exist task).

  Applies when

  • deciding ordering between skill/command expansion and DR hardening
  • a hardened lineage is proposed as the root for a task change
  • robustness regressions appear after adding new command modes

  “S2 的 plant 适应是为直行步态调的，C4 侧走/C3 原地转是完全不同的接触模式，先硬化再改任务 = 给一个即将不存在的任务花预算（push/μ 两轮已实证 DR 预算有限且会被重分配）。故顺序改为 先 C（任务定型）→ 再 S2（plant 硬化）。”

• A nonzero response with the same sign for + and - commands is bias, not abilitysame-sign-response-is-yaw-bias

  Replicatedomnisim-evalmeasurementgate-batteryattribution

  Before crediting any directional skill, test both command signs: response must flip sign with the command; a same-signed pair is a bias to subtract, not an ability to report.

  Symptom

  Root-selection probe showed nonzero wz "tracking percentages" on turn commands, tempting the read that candidates could partially turn.

  Context

  During C-ladder root selection, s1e-500's measured yaw rate was +0.084 rad/s for cmd +0.3 and +0.093 rad/s for cmd -0.3 - same sign both ways. The same check on the C2 baseline gave wz+0.20 -> -0.13 and wz-0.20 -> +0.12 (again same sign), while the alternative root s2e_pd-1400 gave +0.16 / -0.16 - opposite signs, i.e. a genuine 16% command response.

  Change

  Reading corrected and written into the execution sheet: percentages on directional commands are meaningless unless the +cmd and -cmd responses have opposite signs; all three candidates were re-classified as "cannot turn, cannot sidewalk - C2/C3/C4 learn from zero". Acceptance criteria thereafter required "tracking >=50% AND left/right opposite-signed".

  Outcome

  Prevented crediting turn/sidewalk ability that did not exist; the antisymmetry clause became a standing part of every turn and sidewalk PASS condition (C2, C4, C4-redo levels all carry "且左右反号").

  Mechanism

  A constant yaw (or lateral) bias projects onto any command's sign convention and shows up as fake fractional tracking; only sign-antisymmetry under command reversal distinguishes a feedback response to the command from an open-loop offset.

  Applies when

  • evaluating turn/sidewalk/any signed-command tracking percentages
  • a candidate shows partial tracking on an axis it was never trained on
  • writing PASS criteria for a new directional skill

  “C2/C3 那些非零的 wz 百分比不是转向能力 —— 转向+ 与 转向− 的实测同号（s1e：cmd +0.3 → +0.084，cmd −0.3 → +0.093 rad/s），那是恒定偏航偏置。… 三个候选都不会转、都不会侧走。”

• Every rung gets written stop criteria - hit any one, stop; tightened when priors say results should come fastpreregistered-stop-criteria-per-rung

  Replicatedomnitraining-runprocessgate-battery

  Freeze per-rung stop criteria (old-skill floors, new-skill deadline, oscillation signature, known pathology signatures) before training, stop on first hit - and shorten the deadline in proportion to how fast your mechanism says results should appear.

  Symptom

  Continued training past the point of degradation had previously destroyed capabilities (C1 trained away the root's backward skill); without hard stop rules, sunk-cost reasoning keeps runs alive too long.

  Context

  Standard rung protocol - eval_c_matrix every 100 iters at 5 seeds with a fixed criteria list, frozen before training ("开训前写死，事后不许改"): (1) stand or vx+0.15 at <=3/5 for two consecutive points; (2) vx+0.15 tracking <70% for two consecutive points (vs recorded root baseline); (3) oscillation signature - survival repeatedly crossing zero between adjacent checkpoints, stop on first occurrence, do not wait for confirmation; (4) new-skill-no-progress deadline (e.g. wz tracking <30% or still same-signed after iter 400); (5) a known lineage pathology signature (s1c arm-B: scatter -> half-recover -> collapse).

  Change

  Stop budgets scale with prior knowledge: when C4-redo4's feed-forward was already proven open-loop, the no-progress deadline was tightened from +500 to +100 iters ("前馈是开环就给 71~96% 的 … 若 +100 还没有 … 不值得再烧").

  Outcome

  Multiple rungs were stopped exactly on criterion (C4-redo criterion 4 at iter 1200; redo2/redo3 at absolute 900), converting each into a clean hypothesis test instead of a drifting run; no rung burned its full cap on a dead hypothesis.

  Mechanism

  Degradation of retained skills is a lineage-level injury that later training often cannot undo, so detection latency is capital loss; and a stop rule written before the run cannot be bent by hope. Tightening deadlines when priors predict immediate results converts "no result yet" into evidence against the mechanism.

  Applies when

  • starting any resumed/curriculum training rung
  • deciding whether to keep training a run that shows early regression
  • a mechanism-backed change should produce results immediately

  “每 100 iter eval_c_matrix.py --seeds 5，命中任一即停 … 存活在相邻 checkpoint 间反复跨越 0（出现即停）… 收紧版：绝对 iter 900（= +200）时 vy±0.10 跟踪仍 <30% 即停”

• Prove a new penalty actually fires - two ways a clearance term silently did nothinginert-reward-term-audit

  Mechanism understoodwalkreward-shapingreward-shapingplant-calibration

  Before training with a new reward term, log its realized per-step value under the current policy and confirm it is nonzero where intended - check coordinate zero-points against FK and check who occupies the term's gate; and never weaken the term that creates the states your new term needs.

  Symptom

  A newly designed swing-height clearance penalty could have trained as a no-op twice over, and the companion advice to lower feet_air_time actively backfired when tried.

  Context

  Instance 1 (zero-point offset): the proposed code used body_pos_w of the foot link, but that is the ankle_roll_link frame origin, which sits 0.0585 m above the ground even with the foot flat on it - so (0.03 - 0.0585) is always negative and the penalty is永远 0; the 0.0585 offset must be subtracted (verified identical in MuJoCo FK and Isaac). Instance 2 (gate occupancy): the clearance penalty fires only in swing phase; a dragging policy keeps both feet in contact, so the penalty is constantly 0 for exactly the policy it was meant to fix - and worse, any slight lift immediately incurs it, a reverse threshold. Lowering feet_air_time to 0.5 on that advice measurably collapsed air time to 0.0002 (below v3). Corrected understanding: "clearance 是把已有的摆动相抬高, 造出摆动相仍要靠 air_time" - air_time creates the swing phase, clearance raises it.

  Change

  Fixed the height zero-point; kept feet_air_time as the swing-phase creator with clearance layered on top; both errors documented as corrections to the team's own earlier advice.

  Outcome

  With both fixed, swing height rose from 22-23 mm (v2) to 29 mm (v5) to 34 mm (v6); the inert-term failure class entered the standing checklist.

  Mechanism

  A penalty's gradient exists only where its gate is occupied and its argument crosses its threshold; frame offsets shift the threshold out of reach, and phase gates can have zero occupancy under exactly the policy being treated. Terms interact as an ecology - one term must create the states in which another can act.

  Applies when

  • adding any gated or thresholded penalty (clearance, impact, slip)
  • a new term produces no behavioral change at any weight
  • body-frame positions are used in reward code

  “body_pos_w 是 ankle_roll_link 坐标系原点,平放触地时仍高出地面 0.0585 m。… (0.03 − 0.0585) 恒为负 → 惩罚永远是 0 … clearance 惩罚只在摆动相生效,拖地时两脚始终触地 → 惩罚恒 0;而一旦轻微抬脚就立刻扣分,对正在拖地的策略是反向门槛。… 正确认识:clearance 是"把已有的摆动相抬高",造出摆动相仍要靠 air_time。”

• Four consecutive fixes were each continued from the previous fix's degraded state until the user stopped the ladder - "change parameters, don't stack errors" - rolled back to the last good checkpoint and audited the target geometry firststop-stacking-roll-back-and-audit

  Observed oncerecoveryprocessprocessfork-selectionattribution

  When successive rungs each start from the previous rung's output and the target symptom does not move, stop, roll back to the last good checkpoint and re-derive the next change from an audit; keep the measurements, discard the stacked remedies.

  Symptom

  After the real-robot splits, the V2.7 ladder tried to widen the stance: a term swap (A), a new stance knife (b), more iterations (甲), a doubled weight (乙). Stance barely moved while hip yaw ratcheted 46.7 -> 49.9 -> 52.5 deg toward its 60 deg limit.

  Context

  Each rung started from the previous rung's output. The user ruled on 2026-08-11 that things had gone wrong from V2.7-A: go back to v2_6 and rethink which parameters to change instead of stacking errors.

  Change

  乙 was killed at start and not counted; the product baseline rolled back to v2_6c model_29399; every measurement and law learned on the ladder was kept ("the data is real; what stacked was the treatment"). Before any new training, a zero-training kinematic audit of the stance targets was run.

  Outcome

  The audit found the stand_pose target itself rewarding the narrow stance (pose-target-geometric-audit) and showed geometrically why the yawed stance could not be widened with flat feet - so 乙 was proven unnecessary without running it. The next in-lineage attempts still failed, which is what established that the stance is set by the get-up path.

  Mechanism

  A rung continued from a degraded state inherits its compensations, so each new fix answers the previous fix's side effects; the yaw ratchet was the visible trace of that stacking.

  Applies when

  • three or more corrective rungs in a row without progress on the target metric
  • a side-effect metric ratchets in one direction across rungs
  • a new rung is being planned from the latest (not the best) checkpoint

  “用户裁:"从 V2.7-A 开始就出问题了,应该回到 2.6 再思考如何改变参数而不是 错误叠加。"认账:A 的补丁 → b 的新刀 → 甲的加时 → 乙的加权,每级都从上级 的**退化状态**续(yaw 46.7→52.5° 的棘轮就是叠加痕迹)。 … 数据是真的,叠加的是处置。”

• Torque caps cannot soften footfalls - impact is falling-mass momentum, only the reward can treat itlanding-impact-not-fixed-by-torque-caps

  Mechanism understoodwalkreward-shapingreward-shapinghardwareactuator-modeling

  Classify each hardware symptom by the physics that sets it: quantities fixed by ballistic momentum at contact must be treated through the policy's trajectory (reward terms on approach velocity/force), never through actuator caps - and size such penalty weights against your own tracking reward, not a lighter robot's.

  Symptom

  Footfalls slammed at 1.78x body weight in sim baseline (human walking: 1.2-1.5x); the tempting hardware-side fix was cutting actuator torque limits.

  Context

  Measured directly: scaling torque limits from x1.0 down to x0.4 left peak landing force essentially unchanged (1.75 -> 1.78x body weight) - the impact force comes from the momentum of the falling mass at touchdown, not from motor effort. The fix has to change the trajectory, i.e. the policy, i.e. the reward: feet_contact_forces penalty above a threshold of 113 N (= 1.2x the 9.58 kg robot's weight), clipped, weight -0.005. The weight was sized locally, not copied: the reference robot's -0.001 would amount to 0.9% of tracking reward on this robot ("策略不会理它" - the policy would ignore it); -0.005 gives 4.4%.

  Change

  Added threshold-type contact-force penalty (-0.005, threshold 1.2x body weight) as one of v6-minimal's three changes; hardware torque cuts explicitly rejected as a footfall treatment.

  Outcome

  Landing force 1.72x -> 1.55x by v6 (target <1.5x, missed by 3% - progress booked honestly); the torque-cap dead end was documented so it would not be retried.

  Mechanism

  At touchdown the ground stops a ballistic mass; the impulse is set by approach velocity and effective inertia, which motors can no longer influence in the final instant. Only earlier trajectory choices (approach velocity, timing) reduce it - and those are selected by the reward, not by actuator limits.

  Applies when

  • footfall impact or landing noise on hardware
  • proposals to derate torque as a softness fix
  • importing contact-force penalty weights from another robot

  “⚠️ 硬件限扭降不了落脚力 —— 砸地力来自下落质量的动量: 实测 tau ×1.0→×0.4, 落脚力 1.75→1.78× 体重纹丝不动。只有这条奖励能治。… ⚠️ 权重不能用 Pi 的 −0.001 —— 实测在我们身上只占跟踪奖励的 0.9%, 策略不会理它 (Pi 6.94 kg 更轻)。−0.005 给到 4.4%。”

• Audit which joints your imitation term constrains - a task that needs deviation is fighting the referenceimitation-term-scope-audit

  Mechanism understoodomnireward-shapingreward-shapingcurriculum

  List which joints your imitation/deviation terms actually constrain and check the new skill's required motion against that list; for balance-coupled joints deliver references as feed-forward residuals, not absolute-position targets - and never assume "reference = 0" is neutral.

  Symptom

  Sidewalk would not learn despite a dedicated tracking reward; meanwhile the gait-shaping imitation term (joint_pos_ref) computed its error norm over ALL 12 joints while its reference covered only the 6 sagittal joints - roll/yaw reference was constantly 0.

  Context

  Two prior generations had shown the forward gait itself was taught by joint_pos_ref, not discovered by PPO (v6 halved the shaping and swing height collapsed 35 mm -> 4 mm). So the reference is load-bearing - but sidewalk requires hip_roll to deviate from nominal, and the all-joints norm punished exactly that deviation: "一边悬赏一边罚过程" (posting a bounty while punishing the process). A follow-up experiment (C4-redo3, free_roll=True releasing the 4 roll joints from the norm) raised the regularization headroom 6x -> 27x yet sidewalk stayed flat and released hip_roll wandered, killing other skills - net negative, withdrawn. A --roll-absolute probe showed the converse failure: pinning roll to a clock-driven absolute trajectory drove tilt 6.9 -> 13.7 deg. Conclusion recorded: absolute-position imitation cannot teach actions that must be superimposed on state feedback.

  Change

  The audit reframed the problem: neither punishing roll deviation nor freeing roll nor absolute roll tracking works; the reference for a balance-coupled joint must be delivered as feed-forward under the policy's residual control (see feedforward-for-phase-locked-skills).

  Outcome

  free_roll rung: joint_pos_ref term rose 0.887 -> 1.104 (release confirmed effective) but vy stayed flat; regularization hypothesis eliminated by experiment.

  Mechanism

  An imitation error norm defines a cage: joints inside it are pulled to the reference in absolute position, so any skill requiring systematic deviation is taxed per step; but joints carrying active balance cannot follow absolute references either, since their correct position depends on state. The scope and the delivery mechanism of the reference are therefore design decisions per joint, not defaults.

  Applies when

  • adding a skill that moves joints your reference sets to zero/nominal
  • an imitation or deviation penalty coexists with a new tracking reward
  • considering releasing joints from a shaping term mid-lineage

  “前进步态也不是 PPO 自己发现的，是 joint_pos_ref 教出来的（v6 砍半塑形 → 抬脚 35 mm 塌到 4 mm…）。而 ref_joint_offset 原本只写 6 个矢状面关节，roll/yaw 参考恒 0 —— 侧走既没被教，roll 一偏离 nominal 反被 joint_pos_ref 扣分。一边悬赏一边罚过程。”

• When training fails repeatedly, inject the target behavior open-loop - stop tuning rewards for an unverified behavioropen-loop-probe-before-reward-tuning

  Mechanism understoodomniattributionattributionprocesscurriculum

  After two failed training attempts at a skill, stop training: demonstrate the behavior open-loop on the real plant/sim first, and only resume training once you hold a measured, safe, sign-verified target trajectory.

  Symptom

  Three sidewalk training rounds failed; hypotheses multiplied (exploration failure / wrong reference waveform / insufficient authority) with no way to pick between them by running more training.

  Context

  Instead of a fourth reward guess, the team wrote probe_side_ref.py: the candidate reference is injected open-loop on top of a frozen policy's output (bypassing PPO entirely), directly measuring "what happens if the robot literally does this waveform" - separating all three hypotheses in one experiment (5 seeds x 8 s per condition, several waveform families and gains). The probe immediately eliminated the authority hypothesis (full-amplitude execution, 5/5 survival) and localized the problem to the waveform/measurement side. The closing principle was written down after the saga: without a verified target behavior, tuning rewards is "在黑暗里试钥匙" (trying keys in the dark).

  Change

  Standing method: before opening another training rung on a failing skill, build an open-loop (or task-space) generator of the intended behavior, measure whether the physical system can express it and what it looks like - then train toward a verified, quantified target.

  Outcome

  The probe chain produced the verified waveform (reversed-sign triangle, half gain), quantified safe amplitude (tilt 8.2 deg at band top, foot distance clear of the wall), exposed the metric bug when probe and training disagreed, and ultimately supplied the feed-forward that made C4 pass in +100 iters.

  Mechanism

  Training couples exploration, reward design, and feasibility into one opaque outcome; open-loop injection cuts the loop and tests feasibility and waveform alone. A behavior demonstrated open-loop converts the remaining failure into a pure credit-assignment/reward question - and its measured trajectory becomes the reference itself.

  Applies when

  • repeated training failures on one skill with multiple live hypotheses
  • uncertainty whether the platform can physically express the behavior
  • a reference trajectory's shape/sign/amplitude is guessed, not measured

  “三轮 FAIL 之后不再猜，写 train/probe_side_ref.py 把参考开环注入到策略输出之上（绕过 PPO），直接量「照这个波形做会怎样」，一次分开三个假说：甲 探索 / 乙 波形 / 丙 权限。”

• Narrowing the speed range to stop high-speed falls entrenched crouch-shuffling - judge gait quality at the speed that demands a gaitlow-speed-commands-reward-dragging

  Mechanism understoodwalkcurriculumcurriculumreward-shapinggate-battery

  Set command ranges to include speeds that physically demand the target behavior, and evaluate behavior-quality gates at those speeds; when a restriction is added to suppress a failure, check what new optimum it creates at the remaining commands.

  Symptom

  After the command range was narrowed to (0.15, 0.35) m/s (to treat walk_v1's 134% overspeed and 8.3 s fall at 0.5), the policy settled into crouched foot-dragging; tracking rose monotonically with speed (63% at cmd 0.2, 76% at 0.3, 87% at 0.45), showing low speeds were where the degenerate gait was optimal.

  Context

  The narrowing advice was the author's own and is retracted in the file: it treated the symptom (falls at speed) while reinforcing the root cause (at 0.15-0.35 m/s, shuffling in a crouch is globally optimal - the Froude number is so low that even humans would not lift their feet). A zero-cost experiment confirmed the flip side: at cmd 0.5 the same policy met BOTH tracking (81%) and clearance (23.0/23.2 mm) standards.

  Change

  Speed range widened back toward (0.15, 0.5) - upper bound deliberately slightly above the mechanically feasible ~0.44 m/s so the policy finds the boundary itself; acceptance re-pointed: gait-quality criteria (tracking, clearance) judged at 0.45-0.5 m/s, low speed kept only as a survival check.

  Outcome

  v4 -> v6 progression under the widened range delivered 87% tracking with 34 mm clearance; the "low command = drag" account was confirmed by the monotone tracking-vs-speed curve.

  Mechanism

  Command distribution is part of the reward: physics prices gaits per speed, and at very low speed the energetic optimum is no swing phase at all. Restricting training to that regime makes the degenerate gait the correct answer to the posed problem - and grading a gait at a speed that does not require stepping measures nothing.

  Applies when

  • a gait degenerates after a command-range restriction
  • quality metrics improve monotonically toward the range boundary
  • writing acceptance criteria for gait quality vs survival

  “现在看那个建议可能起了反作用:0.15~0.35 m/s 下蹲着蹭就是全局最优,抬腿反而亏。收窄治的是"高速摔倒"的症状,却强化了拖地的病根。… 验收标准里的 cmd 0.2 本身就是拖地速度(Froude 数极低,人在那个速度下也不抬脚)。accept_v2 应把速度跟踪与 clearance 的判定点改到 0.45~0.5 m/s”

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