Decision tags — What a decision is about, in the order the index shows them. Open, unlike the topics: a decision that needs a word it does not have simply gets one.
Taxonomy — the topic vocabulary and what enforces it.
24 of 66 decisions. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| ADR-003 | Apply the topic consolidation and let the config enforce one primary topic | A 2024 document specified a 22-to-7 topic consolidation with real rules, was never applied, and could not be cited. It becomes this decision; the seven categories become tags.yaml; the one-primary-topic rule becomes a tag_groups constraint the lint checks. The reading list gets five extra categories the practice registry never needed. | Active |
| ADR-022 | The primary topic is derived from the first tag, and the lines assert it | The topic vocabulary was a constraint on a list — exactly one tag from the seven — with no way to say which tag that was. Deriving primary_topic from {tags[0]} names it, which lets the chains assert the invariant they actually mean: a line of work stays within one topic. Costs a convention nothing checks, that the primary tag is written first. | Active |
| ADR-024 | The topic vocabulary has four recurring seams — options, not a decision | ADR-021 said to expect a fourth vocabulary decision. Declaring the relations the practice bodies argue produced 25 unbound edges, and they are not scattered: four topic pairs account for eighteen of them. This states the evidence and four options, and decides nothing — the choice is which kind of claim the vocabulary is failing to name, and that is a judgement about the subject rather than about the record. | Superseded — by ADR-049; by ADR-049, which reversed this document’s premise that an unbound edge is not a defect, and took the seams it described to zero. Its options were each taken elsewhere: more than one topic per document by ADR-035, a filing rule by ADR-026 and ADR-046, and new topics by ADR-050. |
| ADR-026 | One topic vocabulary: the practice registry takes the same thirteen the reading list has | ADR-020 scoped the recommendations by kind of claim rather than by domain, and that decision stands. Its rejected alternative does not: it declined to add generative-modeling and vision-and-graphics to the practice vocabulary on a browsing argument that the evidence since has not borne out, and that reads to a later reader as a scope boundary — the exact thing ADR-020 was written to remove. Adds both, making the two vocabularies identical. | Active |
| ADR-027 | The practice vocabulary cannot express a claim about how to evaluate | Reading the generic-bullet corpus produced four recommendations about measurement, and the practice vocabulary has nowhere to file them. The LIT side has analysis-and-evaluation; the practice side does not, and unlike the other two topics missing from it, this one is a kind of claim rather than a domain. Adds it, making eleven. | Superseded — by ADR-028 |
| ADR-028 | One topic vocabulary, one set of glosses: the blurbs are shared too | ADR-026 made the two topic lists identical and recorded that “the two vocabularies become identical”. The keys did; the glosses did not — each scheme kept its own copy, ten of thirteen diverged, and the reading list’s header still described a vocabulary of twelve words that had held thirteen since ADR-026. One topics table now holds both, blurbs included. ADR-027’s deliberate narrowing of analysis-and-evaluation does not survive: a blurb answers “what is this about?”, which ADR-026 already settled is scheme-independent. That decision’s substantive holding — the topic exists, it is a kind of claim, the four practices stay — is carried forward. Rejected: keeping two vocabularies with identical keys, which is the structure that produced the drift. | Active |
| ADR-031 | A scheme for explanations, complementing the practice registry | A third scheme, THEORY, for claims about WHY something works. Two schemes could say what a paper’s standing is and what you should do, and had nowhere to put the reason — which showed up as eight practices whose titles state a behaviour rather than an instruction, and 48 of 225 notes that no practice cites, two of them saying in their own bodies that they carry no practice deliberately. A THEORY names its source: like a practice does, and explains: the practices it underwrites, which the practices read back as explained_by:. Rejected: a status or a tag on SOTA, which would make Rejected mean two things at once — batch normalization needs a rejected explanation and an active practice on the same day. | Active — Promoted by the owner on 2026-09-23 without the event its promotion condition named, a theory Rejected while the practice it explained stays Active. The scheme had been in use since filing: 84 theories, and 69 practices that carry explained_by. |
| ADR-035 v3 | A document may carry more than one topic; the first is the primary | The topic group moves from exactly-one to any on all four schemes, and the chain invariant moves from primary_topic to tags. A document is often about two of the thirteen — a positional-encoding scheme is also an attention technique — and under exactly-one recording the second meant deleting the first, which is what the retagging pass in #140 did to eleven documents. With several topics allowed, the invariant should ask what a relation actually asserts: that its members share a subject, not that they share their FIRST subject. Measured, the switch binds three edges — two rightly, one on a flash-attention label added in #101 to bind it, which is removed. 24 unbound relations become 22. | Active |
| ADR-036 | An unbound relation is one of four things, and only one of them is a retag | The unbound-lineage report had 38 relations and 16 lines. Reading all of them: 15 documents were plainly mis-filed and are retagged, two sibling links were analogies rather than comparisons and are removed, and the remaining 24 are two structural facts about the vocabulary — that analysis-and-evaluation is a kind rather than a subject and will unbind every lineage it touches, and that the record has no relation for “this is the domain-specific instance of that”. Neither is fixed by retagging, and retagging to clear them is the move luria.yaml already warns against. | Superseded — by ADR-048; Superseded only in its fourth category. The four-way classification, the fifteen retags and the two removed sibling links all stand; what changed is the verdict on trunk papers whose contribution spans two topics, which this decision left standing because splitting one would file it under half its contribution. ADR-046 made splitting unnecessary — such a paper carries both topics — so the successor retags six documents rather than leaving them. |
| ADR-038 v2 | A note has no topics of its own: it derives them from its paper | NOTE.tags and NOTE.primary_topic are derived from the paper the note reads. A note and its paper are the same object, so a second copy of the subject was a second copy free to disagree — and four of the 158 were. Rejected: asserting the agreement with invariant: tags on NOTE.paper, which reports the disagreement instead of making it impossible; and declaring an invariant on the other five cross-scheme relations, which join a claim to a paper or an explanation and which ADR-026’s filing rule expects to differ. | Active |
| ADR-040 | Advice on how to prove a theorem is out of scope; advice on how to find out whether a technique worked is not | Six recommendations in the #139 import tell a reader how to construct a proof — use the bounded-Lipschitz metric, check a log-Sobolev inequality, work in a rigged Hilbert space. They were struck by one filer without a decision, and analysis-and-evaluation is broad enough that the cut was not obviously right. It is right, and the reason is the scope test in ADR-026: the reader this anthology addresses is training a model. A proof technique is advice to someone writing a paper about training, which is a different person. | Active |
| ADR-041 | An algorithm-local tuning constant belongs in the reading of the paper that measured it, not in the practice registry | A number fitted to one algorithm on one workload is a finding about that paper, not a recommendation to a reader who may not be running that algorithm. It stays in the note’s ## Recommendations section, where it is already visible and already attributed, and it does not become a SOTA document. The test: strip the algorithm’s name from the sentence and see whether anything is left to do. | Active |
| ADR-049 | Unbound is never the resting state: the relation is evidence that a tag is missing | An unbound relation is a defect with exactly two readings — the invariant is missing, or the relation is wrong — and never a third where the answer is to note that somebody looked. Twenty-two unbound relations and ten unbound lines are now zero, by naming what twenty-one documents were already about. Also removes a groups.primary_topic block that constrained nothing and had silently drifted from the vocabulary. Rejected: an acknowledgement directive, and dropping analysis-and-evaluation. | Active |
| ADR-050 | Two more topics: numerics and precision, and in-context learning | The vocabulary goes from fourteen to sixteen. numerics-and-precision because 48 documents about how many bits sat across nine topics with none holding a quarter, and because two topics each claimed a fragment in a trailing blurb item. in-context-learning because every item in adaptation-and-tuning’s blurb changes the weights or the window and ICL changes neither. A third candidate, retrieval, was rejected on counting. | Active |
| ADR-052 | Two more topics: one that had a trailing clause for a home, and one that had nothing | Eighteen topics, from sixteen. multimodal-learning takes nine documents that sat across six topics while model-architecture’s blurb carried “multi-modal designs” as a trailing clause — the same half-home shape ADR-050 found for numerics. deployment-and-society names nothing in the record at all and twenty-four papers on the incoming list, led by its single highest-revisit entry. Rejected on counting: mechanistic interpretability, the physics of learning, safety, agents, graphs, federated learning, human-AI interaction and scientific domains. | Active |
| ADR-055 | Declare invariant: tags on SOTA.source, after taking the backlog to zero | schemes.SOTA.references.source now declares invariant: tags, so a practice and every paper behind it must share at least one topic. The declaration is second: the pass came first, and took 60 unbound rows to 0. Rejected: declaring it over the standing backlog, which would have made the report read 60 with no way to retire a row that had been looked at — a signal turned into wallpaper, since no unbound-ok: directive exists. | Active |
| ADR-056 | capability-thresholds: whether a capability arrives abruptly is a claim, not a method | A nineteenth topic, capability-thresholds, for a capability that arrives abruptly rather than smoothly — emergence at scale, grokking, phase transitions — and the dispute about whether the discontinuity is real. analysis-and-evaluation was holding all nineteen such documents and is a word for methods, not for claims about the world. Rejected: leaving them there, which made the record’s largest live controversy unbrowsable; and emergence, which names one axis of three. | Active |
| ADR-057 | Three practices from one paper are siblings by source, not a line of practice | SOTA-037 extends SOTA-036 and SOTA-038 extends SOTA-036 are removed. extends means “could not stand without”, and neither practice depends on SOTA-036’s particular corpus, context length or objective — they depend on the class of model. All three name source: LIT-035, which already records the connection, so extends was saying “same paper” a second time in the wrong vocabulary. SOTA-038 also loses the model-architecture tag added to bind the edge. Rejected: a new enabled_by relation, and a domain tag, both of which preserve a lineage that is not one. | Active |
| ADR-058 | A library is evidence about consensus, and its observation lives in a report | A repository that implements a technique is evidence for consensus and for nothing else. The judgement lands in consensus_note, naming the libraries checked and the date; the observation lands in a generated report, pinned by ref and recomputable. A library does not become a LIT note — its paper may already be one. Rejected: implementations:, which already means four things and would be made permanently unreadable by a fifth. | Proposed |
| ADR-059 | biomolecular-modeling, and the topics as an axis rather than a scope | A twentieth topic, biomolecular-modeling, for models whose data is molecules: protein and nucleic-acid structure prediction, biological sequence language models, docking and molecular property prediction. It also records the rule the gap exposed. The topics organize what the anthology holds, they do not decide what it may hold, so content the axis cannot place is a finding about the axis. Rejected: declining AlphaFold as “outside the topics”, which is what happened first, and a protein-structure-prediction word too narrow for AlphaFold 3 or for the RNA paper already in the record. | Active |
| ADR-060 | concept-geometry | A twenty-second topic, concept-geometry, for how concepts are laid out in a model’s representation space: linear directions and the structures built from them, superposition and the dictionaries that separate it, probing and steering along those directions, and whether different models reach the same geometry. Four documents take it as their primary topic, moved from representation-and-encoding, whose blurb is about encoding the input and does not cover them. Twelve more add it as a secondary tag. Rejected: widening representation-and-encoding, and interpretability, which names a purpose rather than a subject and would absorb most of analysis-and-evaluation. | Active |
| ADR-064 | agents-and-environments, graphs-and-networks, physical-sciences, human-ai-interaction | Four topics, taking the vocabulary from twenty-two to twenty-six: agents-and-environments, graphs-and-networks, physical-sciences and human-ai-interaction. Filing the reading feed’s revisit list (#180) declined three papers because no topic held them and filed four more under the nearest wrong word, each saying so; under ADR-059 that is the axis being short. Existing documents whose subject the new words name take them, first where it is their main subject and as a secondary tag otherwise. Rejected: a separate collective-intelligence, which agents-and-environments covers, and leaving the papers unfiled, which ADR-059 rules out. | Active |
| ADR-065 | Theories can be contested: contested_by and rivals | The THEORY scheme gains two relations for an account that is disputed and not yet replaced: contested_by (LIT, no converse), for a paper whose evidence cuts against it, as on SOTA; and rivals (THEORY, symmetric), for another account of the same phenomenon that cannot also be right. Both are explain: cited. THEORY-070’s corrects on the two weight-norm grokking accounts becomes rivals, which is what its own promote_when already said. Rejected: stretching corrects to cover disputes, and one combined relation that takes either a paper or a theory. | Active |
| ADR-066 | Two subtopics under generative modeling | Twenty-eight topics, from twenty-six. flows-and-transport and few-step-generation are secondary-only words, carried beside their parent topic and never as a document’s primary, as tiny-models already is. generative-modeling was on 169 documents and inference-optimization on 89, and the flow and few-step work inside them could not be browsed apart from GANs, tokenizers, serving and speculative decoding. Rejected: promoting the vocabulary to a scheme to get real parent-child terms, and splitting generative-modeling into primary topics. | Active |