The 39.3M ablation said the privileged critic hurt (switching it off won 0.5160
[0.505, 0.527]). Head to head at 131M, both sides trained identically, it says the
opposite: off *loses*, 0.4633 [0.453, 0.474]. Against league the critic-on model
scores 0.6094 and the critic-off one 0.5526.
The critic earns its keep once there is enough data to fit it -- at 39.3M the
privileged value trunk is underfit and only adds advantage noise. Defaulted back
on, with the small-scale number kept in the docstring as a warning: an ablation at
a budget you do not intend to ship can invert.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XBQKgvBbxbheiTF1AVy1Sh
coolguyandClaude Opus 4.8
4d1c4473b6