porting-2-oracle

---

name: porting-2-oracle description: Builds the oracle packet Stage 4 implements against: tensor dumps, reference transcripts, measured reference WER, and provisional tolerances. Use after porting-1-intake clears Gate A and before porting-3-convert. Output: tests/golden//.manifest.json, build/validate///, reports/wer/-REF..{jsonl,score.json}, and tests/tolerances/.json.

porting-2-oracle

Second stage of the porting pipeline. Produces the oracle packet Stage 4 implements against: tensor dumps, reference transcripts, measured reference WER, and provisional tolerances.

Preconditions

• reports/porting/<family>/<variant>/intake.json exists, is schema-valid, Preflight Gate A green.
• The per-family reference environment exists at scripts/envs/<family>/pyproject.toml. If not, this skill creates it.
• The per-family dump adapter exists at scripts/dump_reference_<family>_<framework>.py. If not, this skill creates a skeleton following the contract in scripts/lib/ref_dump.py (or in one of the existing dumpers).
• A committed reference checkpoint is available to the reference framework (HF download or $TRANSCRIBE_MODELS_DIR/<slug>/).
• uv is installed.

Oracle packet contents

After this stage finishes, the oracle packet is exactly:

tests/golden/<family>/<variant>.manifest.json
build/validate/<family>/<variant>/<case>/<stage>/ref/                  # tensor dumps + sidecars
build/validate/<family>/<variant>/dump_coverage.json                   # tensor catalog
build/validate/<family>/<variant>/<case>/<stage>/ref/transcript.json   # reference transcript per decode case
reports/wer/<variant>-REF.<dataset>.jsonl                              # per-utterance reference hyps (one-for-one debug oracle)
reports/wer/<variant>-REF.<dataset>.score.json                         # reference-measured WER baseline (the gate, not the published number)
tests/tolerances/<family>.json                                         # provisional, Stage 4 finalizes

<case> is the manifest case identifier (typically jfk for the default sample; families may add additional audio cases). Per-stage tensors live under <case>/encoder/, <case>/decoder/, etc., per the dumper's stage names.

Workflow

Oracle progress:
- [ ] Step 1: Confirm or write per-family env + dumper
- [ ] Step 2: Complete the golden manifest
- [ ] Step 3: Run the dumper for every manifest case
- [ ] Step 4: Verify reference transcripts
- [ ] Step 5: Generate dump_coverage.json
- [ ] Step 6: Write provisional tolerances from per-tensor magnitude
- [ ] Step 7: Reference WER baseline ran on the acceptance dataset
- [ ] Step 8: Sign-off review

Step 1: Per-family env and dumper

Check for scripts/envs/<family>/pyproject.toml and scripts/dump_reference_<family>_<framework>.py.

If the family is already ported (either script exists): use as-is.

If the family is new:

• Create scripts/envs/<family>/pyproject.toml from the closest existing reference env.
• Create scripts/dump_reference_<family>_<framework>.py from the closest dumper. It MUST emit tensors via ref_dump.write_tensor and transcripts via write_transcript; sidecars must include rms and p99_abs.
• Surface only unresolved technical decisions to the user.

Step 2: Complete the golden manifest (execute)

porting-1-intake wrote a skeleton at tests/golden/<family>/<variant>.manifest.json. Fill it in:

• reference.{kind, entrypoint, source, revision} — kind from intake.reference_framework, entrypoint pointing to the family dumper, source + revision to the pinned upstream URL + tag.
• frontend, tokenizer_summary, capabilities from intake.
• cases: [...] — the audio cases the dumper will run. Default is [{audio: "samples/jfk.wav"}]. Add additional rows only when the family has unusual audio characteristics that one sample cannot cover (non-English, tonal, music, long-form). Confirm with the user before adding cases beyond the default.
• Remove the _skeleton marker.

See tests/golden/parakeet/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2.manifest.json for the complete shape.

Step 3: Reference dumps (execute)

For every entry in manifest.cases[], run the dumper's encoder + decode subcommands. Default invocation for samples/jfk.wav:

uv run --project scripts/envs/<family> \
  scripts/dump_reference_<family>_<framework>.py encoder \
  --model <hf_repo> \
  --audio samples/jfk.wav \
  --out build/validate/<family>/<variant>/jfk/encoder/ref

uv run --project scripts/envs/<family> \
  scripts/dump_reference_<family>_<framework>.py decode \
  --model <hf_repo> \
  --audio samples/jfk.wav \
  --out build/validate/<family>/<variant>/jfk/decode/ref

Subcommand names vary per dumper — check the script's --help for the exact set. For families with extra subcommands (e.g. mel, prompt) run each as the family contract requires.

If the reference produces a transcript that is implausible (gibberish, empty, language mismatch), STOP — the reference setup is broken, and fixing it is a precondition for any C++ work. Do not proceed.

Step 4: Reference transcripts (execute)

Every reference decode pass should produce a transcript when the dumper exposes one. Use scripts/lib/ref_dump.py::write_transcript (most existing dumpers already call it). Verify build/validate/<family>/<variant>/<case>/<stage>/ref/transcript.json exists for any decode pass that produces text or tokens.

If the reference framework does not expose a transcript helper for a given decode path, skip the transcript write for that case rather than inventing one — Stage 4's behavior validation runs against the C++ runtime via the family-doc Capability Validation table, not against synthetic reference transcripts.

Step 5: Generate dump_coverage.json (execute)

Walk build/validate/<family>/<variant>/ and write dump_coverage.json with {family, variant, tensors: [{case, stage_dir, stage, name, shape, dtype}, ...]}.

One entry per tensor sidecar — that means every .json file under <case>/<stage>/ref/ whose contents include the tensor metadata fields written by scripts/lib/ref_dump.py::write_tensor (name, shape, dtype, layout, plus rms / p99_abs). Skip any other JSON files in the same directory: transcript.json (text/tokens, not a tensor), and any future behavioral artifacts the dumper grows. The discriminator is presence of shape + dtype + layout in the parsed JSON; iterating purely on .json extension would silently include transcripts and corrupt validate.py's tensor list.

This catalog is the contract Stage 4 consumes to know exactly which tensors to emit and compare.

Step 6: Provisional tolerances from per-tensor magnitude (execute)

Write tests/tolerances/<family>.json with one entry per tensor, derived from the magnitude statistics already recorded in each sidecar (p99_abs and rms):

max_abs  = max(1e-4 × p99_abs, 1e-6)   # 0.01% of typical large value
mean_abs = max(1e-5 × rms,     1e-6)   # 0.001% of RMS energy

When the same tensor name appears in multiple (case, stage_dir) sidecars, take the max p99_abs and rms across them so the budget covers the worst-magnitude instance.

Per-tensor entry: {max_abs, mean_abs, _provisional: true}. Top-of-file _comment (array of strings) states:

• These tolerances are magnitude-aware: 1e-4 × p99_abs for max, 1e-5 × rms for mean, with a 1e-6 floor.
• They are provisional — Stage 4 finalizes them against observed C++ drift.
• Entries with _provisional: true make finalization-not-yet-run obvious.
• Do NOT ship a model while _provisional entries remain.

Tensors well above this budget in Stage 4 are signals to investigate.

Step 7: Reference WER baseline (execute)

The Oracle WER run is the downstream accuracy baseline. Do not gate against publisher scores: Stage 4 and Stage 7 compare C++ against this measured reference run on our manifest and normalization. If intake captured a publisher score, compare and report the delta for context only.

Keep every per-utterance reference hypothesis. Later WER drift should diff C++ vs captured reference hyp_text by id instead of re-running the reference.

The acceptance dataset is intake.upstream_benchmarks[0].dataset (default LibriSpeech test-clean). Build the WER manifest once if it does not exist, then run the per-family reference runner over the full acceptance manifest and score it:

DATASET=$(uv run python -c "import json; \
  print(json.load(open('reports/porting/<family>/<variant>/intake.json'))['upstream_benchmarks'][0]['dataset'].replace(' ','-').lower())")

# Build the manifest if this dataset has not been ingested yet.
[ -f samples/wer/${DATASET}.manifest.jsonl ] || \
  uv run scripts/wer/ingest.py librispeech   # or: fleurs --lang <bcp47>

uv run --project scripts/envs/<family> \
  scripts/wer/run_reference_<family>_<framework>.py \
  --manifest samples/wer/${DATASET}.manifest.jsonl \
  --model <hf_repo> \
  --out reports/wer/<variant>-REF.${DATASET}.jsonl

uv run scripts/wer/score.py reports/wer/<variant>-REF.${DATASET}.jsonl
# writes reports/wer/<variant>-REF.${DATASET}.score.json

This is a one-time reference run. Stage 4 and Stage 7 gate C++ WER against this same file; the reference is not re-run downstream.

GPU option (Modal). To run the reference on cloud GPUs instead of locally, use the remote sweep — it installs the family venv on a GPU container and runs the same runner, returning the JSONL to score locally:

modal run scripts/wer/remote/modal_sweep.py::reference_sweep \
  --variants <family>:<variant> --gpu L4

It writes the same reports/wer/<variant>-REF.<dataset>.jsonl. See scripts/wer/remote/REFERENCE_SWEEP_SPEC.md. A new family needs a scripts/wer/run_reference_<family>_*.py with the uniform --manifest/--model/--out/--device/--batch-size contract (copy the closest same-framework one).

Step 8: Sign-off

Report:

• Number of manifest cases dumped.
• Total tensor count in dump_coverage.json.
• Path to the manifest.
• Tolerance summary: median and max max_abs across tensors so the user can eyeball whether the magnitude-aware numbers look sane (e.g. a logits-scale tensor should have a budget on the order of 1e-2; an embedding-scale tensor 1e-4).
• Per-case transcript paths so the user can sanity-check the reference output before C++ work.
• Reference WER baseline: measured reference WER on the acceptance dataset, the published score if present, the delta between them, the dataset + utterance count, and the reports/wer/<variant>-REF.<dataset>.{jsonl,score.json} paths.
• Confirmation that the user reviewed the provisional tolerances.

Do not commit.

Postconditions

• Every path listed in "Oracle packet contents" exists and uses the same <family>/<variant>/<case>/<stage> conventions.
• Tensor sidecars include rms and p99_abs; dump_coverage.json catalogs tensors only.
• tests/tolerances/<family>.json is provisional, derived from per-tensor magnitude, every tensor carries _provisional: true, and the user reviewed it.
• The measured reference WER baseline exists for the acceptance dataset, and any measured-vs-published gap was reported to the user.

Pointers (read, not execute)

• docs/porting/2-artifacts-and-goldens.md — manifest contract
• docs/porting/4-numerical-validation.md — where this file's outputs flow next
• scripts/lib/ref_dump.py — shared write_tensor / write_transcript
• Existing dumpers as template references:
  • scripts/dump_reference_parakeet_nemo.py
  • scripts/dump_reference_cohere_transformers.py
  • scripts/dump_reference_qwen3_asr_author.py
  • scripts/dump_reference_whisper_transformers.py
• Reference WER (Step 7):
  • scripts/wer/run_reference_<family>_<framework>.py — per-family reference WER runners (copy the closest same-framework one for a new family); local, GPU-accelerated if torch sees one
  • scripts/wer/ingest.py — builds the acceptance manifest (librispeech / fleurs)
  • scripts/wer/score.py — shared scorer; writes <report>.score.json