manga-recap-pipeline/HANDOFF.md

HANDOFF, 2026-08-12 (sixth session)

Live state is in NEXT.md. This file is only what this session did. The previous handoff is in JOURNAL.md.

Asked

The two context files, then "go" on the third GPU cycle, then "commit", then "what's next". Then the user checked the lead's crops in the review UI and said the assignments were wrong. Then "test on one of the panels first". Then "mind presenting the panels with boxes". Then "so, we didn't fix it properly?". Then "go with the 1".

Result

One worker fix proven on a GPU. One measurement that killed the plan's item 1. One GPU cycle. Then the user found the registry is over-merged, which invalidates the cycle's headline numbers, and two more fixes were written for it. The third fix the user chose, item 1 of the three options, is NOT started.

metric	17:38 run	18:07 run
detections	117	119
assignments	59	68
coverage	50%	57%
degenerate boxes	1	0
assigned among face-bearing	59/72 = 82%	68/71 = 96%
assigned among gated	--	0
chains deeper than one hop	1	0
merged_from stamps	9	22

Cycle timings, 18:07-18:13 UTC: vision 116/116 in 3m59s, identity 116/116 in 1m24s, reconcile 18/18 in 50s.

Committed and proven on a GPU

_bbox_to_pixels sorts each coordinate pair after clamping (decisions/identity-bbox.md#bbox-corners-ordered). 0 degenerate boxes over 119 detections, against 1 in 117. Commit 54bd126 on restore-runtime. Its caveat is deleted.

Measured, no code

The 145 ground-truth labels are for a different manga. Every row in identity_labels keys to chapter 8ca8249b, cast "Rico" and "Ikekin", 81 panels. Chapter 7c944dd4 has zero, so /review/identity?job_id=778297bc... returns labeled: 0, accuracy: null. Scoring 8ca8249b gives 7/138 on a run with 44 assignments over 246 panels, predating every fix.

Coverage is the has_face gate and nothing else. All 68 assignments landed on face-bearing detections and none on a gated one. Recall among face-bearing detections is 96%, up from 82%.

Embedding cosine cannot separate people. All 22 crop embeddings for the lead, pulled from manga/<manga_id>/characters/_crops/*.npy, 1152 dims, L2-normalised. The cat scores up to 0.82 against men, two different men score 0.93, the highest pair in the matrix is 0.96 (caveats/audit-open.md#cosine-not-identity). This rules out a crop-to-crop cosine link, which was the fix proposed one message before the measurement.

Written, tested, NOT deployed and NOT run on a GPU

Both in /mnt/server/home/kami/docker-apps/manga-infra/orchestrator/, uncommitted there:

• tracklets.py: link_tracklets rejects a merge whose group would span more than window panels (decisions/identity-bbox.md#tracklet-span-cap). window bounded each pair, transitivity was unbounded, and the lead's 22 native assignments came from 3 tracklets spanning 0, 22 and 30 panels.
• tracklets.py + service.py: one appearance_tokens with a GENERIC stopword set, and service._appearance_tokens delegates to it, so reconcile's pre-filter is fixed too (decisions/identity-bbox.md#generic-tokens). Whole chains hung on the word short, one pair on the word hair.

On the same 22 crops, candidate overlap forced to pass: 3 tracklets at worst span 30 becomes 9 at worst span 8.

Not started

Item 1, which the user chose: stop letting cosine pick the gallery. run_stage_identity builds union_cands from the members' cosine top-k. So a metric that cannot separate people decides who gemma is even allowed to consider. There are 9 live characters. Send the live cast instead, gender-gated, capped and logged when truncated. Two traps found while reading it:

• /vision/resolve sends up to 3 reference images per candidate (worker_vision.py:1057), so 9 candidates is 27 images plus the query. It needs a cap.
• only a crop with a non-empty cosine shortlist enters shortlists at all, via the if s.get("candidates") guard in service.py. An empty top-k drops the crop from resolution entirely.

Also open: nothing downstream re-ran, the job is still parked at dialogue waiting, and vision boxes cats as people and dresses them (p081, p108).

Checks

.venv/bin/python worker_vision.py     # self-check ok, including the swapped-corner assert
./check_stale.sh                      # exit 0 before the cycle and after it
/usr/bin/ssh kami@192.168.1.104 "cd /home/kami/docker-apps/manga-infra/orchestrator && python3 tracklets.py && python3 -m pytest -q --ignore=test_api.py"   # self-check ok, 118 passed

Every new assert was confirmed to fail with its fix disabled: the span cap returns [[0, 1, 2]], and the generic-word pair links with GENERIC emptied.

Next command

Deploy the two orchestrator fixes and run the fourth cycle.

cd /home/kami/Programs/n8n-worker && ./check_stale.sh     # must exit 0
/usr/bin/ssh kami@192.168.1.104 "cd /home/kami/docker-apps/manga-infra/orchestrator && docker compose up -d --build orchestrator"
J=778297bc-e7ce-439d-91b5-8a027060d17f; M=ef105a86-4b7e-4ac4-b45c-b7d83b8f5b5e
/usr/bin/ssh kami@192.168.1.104 "curl -s -X POST http://127.0.0.1:9090/characters/reset -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{\"manga_id\":\"$M\",\"confirm\":true}'"
# the reset returns restart_identity_worker: true -- honour it, see the traps
/usr/bin/ssh kami@192.168.1.104 "curl -s -X POST http://127.0.0.1:9090/stage/clear -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{\"job_id\":\"$J\",\"stage\":\"vision\"}'"
for S in vision identity reconcile; do /usr/bin/ssh kami@192.168.1.104 "curl -s --max-time 5400 -X POST http://127.0.0.1:9090/stage/run -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{\"job_id\":\"$J\",\"stage\":\"$S\"}'"; done
/usr/bin/ssh kami@192.168.1.104 "docker logs manga-orchestrator --since 1h 2>&1 | grep tracklet"   # expect ~30 tracklets, was 12
/usr/bin/ssh kami@192.168.1.104 "docker exec manga-orchestrator python3 /app/audit_registry.py 7c944dd4-e972-42c7-ba60-9f6939548e80 6"

Then re-check the lead's crops by eye. A stage counter will not show this defect.

Traps confirmed or found

• Restart a worker with tmux send-keys -t manga-workers:<window> C-c, then re-send the launch line from start_workers.sh with its MIOPEN_ENV prefix. A pgrep kill matches the calling shell.
• POST /characters/reset returns restart_identity_worker: true. Honour it, the worker caches the registry.
• identity_assignments has no method column. The merged_from: stamps live in identity_assignment_sources. chapters has no title column. The orchestrator image has no numpy.
• A heredoc piped into docker exec over /usr/bin/ssh silently produces no output. Write the script to a file, scp it, docker cp it, then run it.
• Mixing echo with a tar cf - stream over ssh corrupts the archive. Separate the calls.
• panel_order and the panel filename differ by one: panel_order 10 is p009.png.