The Weaverarxiviq.com
The Weaver · arxiviq.com

Method, recipe, and evidence

R&D · Evidence-backed

The org recipe behind arxiviq.com, with the dated evidence that supports each choice. Every claim traces to a row in EVIDENCE.md. RAG Embeddings is not shipped on a hypothesis. See the Research Registry for the full method table.

Plain-language takeaway

arxiviq.com runs a domain-tuned embedding model on a harvested arXiv corpus. We only ship changes that pass measured deploy gates (nDCG, effective rank, edge-tier drop). Methods that looked good in synthetic sweeps but failed real-pair eval or edge stress were rejected — the timeline below is the audit trail, not marketing copy.

Case study: production training inside a 1 GB container

This site's serving model is trained in production on the platform's own lifecycle: corpus → pair synthesis → head-only training (frozen backbone, features extracted once) → evaluation gates on the served representation → charter → deploy. The trained artifact is a ~3 MB projection head stored in Postgres; the backbone loads from the baked HuggingFace cache at serve time, with no GPU, no shared filesystem, and no plan upgrade.

Production API unreachable from this build. Metrics render when SYNTH_API_KEY is configured.

Method notes: no ASN weight surgery on this path (rejected 0/4 in fleet evidence); gates grade the representation that actually serves; baseline numbers were measured on the identical pair set and metric code (provenance differs by host and is labeled). Full row: EVIDENCE.md § production head-only split.

Org recipe (charter)config/recipes/research.json · updated 2026-07-02
Base modelsentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2
Epochs / batch3 / 16
LossInfoNCE temp=0.07, zELO w=0
PEFTon
ASNkStrong=8, kTail=8, λ=0.5
Newton-Schulz5 steps
Matryoshka dims64 · 128 · 256 · 384
RollbackRevert if rotating-slice nDCG drops >0.02 vs charter baseline.
Evidence program

Based on 891 runs and 1,190 trainings. Sources: EVIDENCE.md §3.1–§3.8, SWEEP_FINDINGS.md, SWEEP_REPORT.md.

Evidence timeline

2026-06-27
EVIDENCE §3.1
Root cause fixed; trigger bug identified

Encoder effective-rank collapse traced to a projector-window trigger bug, not the contrastive loss. Re-run with the fixed trigger.

2026-06-27
EVIDENCE §3.2
Three-tier spectral surgery REJECTED

Original ASN weight-space SVD surgery makes collapse worse in a real collapse regime (served rank 3.4 → 1.0; kNN −12–21pts). Archived.

2026-06-27
EVIDENCE §3.4
Loss-space rank floor (VICReg) SUPPORTED

VICReg prevents collapse where it occurs (non-contrastive / low-negative regimes). Neutral on standard InfoNCE real-text. Kept as insurance.

2026-06-27
EVIDENCE §3.6
Real-text validation: VICReg neutral; domain fine-tune beats SOTA in-domain

AG News kNN 0.892 / nDCG 0.822 after fine-tune. Per-tenant domain fine-tuning is the defensible moat: it beats general commercial embeddings in-domain with no OOD forgetting. Reconfirmed 2026-06-28.

2026-06-28
EVIDENCE §3.7
Tenant corpus vs commercial baseline (Phase A fleet)

Barlow Twins top method in Bayesian TPE search (robust 1.42, #1 of 6). Matryoshka (MRL) truncation training promoted, the real lever for cheap truncated serving. int8 quantized serving essentially lossless (kNN_int8 ≈ kNN_full).

2026-06-28
EVIDENCE §3.8
Large-scale VICReg campaign (500 runs)

VICReg rank floor confirmed regime-specific: +0.32 kNN for SimSiam, ~0 for InfoNCE batch≥16. Not a default term; insurance only.

2026-07-02
EVIDENCE §2 / REV-905
Eval gate now fails closed

Removed the silent demo-pair fallback in core-api eval. Gates cannot pass on hard-coded demo pairs; MIN_REAL_PAIRS_EVAL=8 enforced. Deploy spine is honestly certifying.

What we ship, promote, and reject

Tested and rejected

  • Three-tier spectral surgery (original ASN)
    rank 3.4 → 1.0; kNN −12–21pts · EVIDENCE §3.2
  • spectral_lift (rank-floor surgery)
    rank 2.06 vs do-nothing 3.40 · EVIDENCE §3.3
  • Sleep / SHY consolidation (AwakenedSleepNet)
    phasic rank 9.99 / 5.71 vs continuous 21.0 · EVIDENCE §3.5
  • DINO-style centering
    robust score 1.08 (#6 of 6) · EVIDENCE §3.7 wave-2
Deploy gates (eval-harness)

A model reaches arxiviq.com only when every gate passes for real. Gates fail closed when a dimension is unmeasured, never stubbed true.

rankAboveBaselineeffective_rank > 8.0measured
ndcgNonRegressionnDCG ≥ 0.35 (k=2 proxy; k=10 benchmark pending exam port)measured
mrlWithinToleranceknn_t8 ≥ 0.30 AND (knn_full − knn_t8) ≤ 0.05; fail-closed if unmeasuredmeasured (fail-closed)
sufficientEvalPairs≥ 8 real collection pairs (no demo-pair fallback)measured (REV-905)
Corpus: 702 arXiv abstracts harvested across CS.CL / retrieval / embedding queries into data/corpora/research/corpus.jsonl. Re-kickoff with pnpm harvest:arxiv && pnpm kickoff:orgs after the stack is up.