manga-recap-pipeline/NEXT.md

NEXT

Updated 2026-08-12 (sixth session). What the fifth session did is in HANDOFF.md, the runs are in JOURNAL.md.

State

The chapter runs end to end. The A/V sync defect is fixed and chapter.mp4 is rebuilt: video 364.120s against audio 364.122s at 25/1.

Job 778297bc-e7ce-439d-91b5-8a027060d17f, chapter 7c944dd4-e972-42c7-ba60-9f6939548e80, 116 panels. Three GPU cycles ran on 2026-08-12, the last 18:07-18:13 UTC on a reset registry. The job is running and parked at dialogue waiting. Everything from dialogue down is cleared and stale. All 9 workers are current.

Eight changes are proven on real panels. The fourth session contributed four. The fifth added the roster-hint removal, merge-chain flattening and name_claims reset. This session added bbox corner ordering.

The registry is not trustworthy. LIM SEONHO's 36 assignments cover at least six different men, a chibi and a cat, confirmed by eye in the review UI. 22 of those are native resolves and 14 came from reconcile merges, so both mechanisms are wrong.

Two fixes are written and tested but NOT deployed and NOT run on a GPU, both in the orchestrator repo:

• link_tracklets caps a tracklet's panel span (decisions/identity-bbox.md#tracklet-span-cap)
• one shared appearance tokenizer drops generic words (decisions/identity-bbox.md#generic-tokens)

On the same 22 crops, 3 tracklets at worst span 30 becomes 9 at worst span 8.

Coverage was 57% on the 18:07 run, and it is the has_face gate and nothing else. All 68 assignments landed on face-bearing detections, so recall among them is 68 of 71. Degenerate boxes are 0 in 119 and the merge chain is flat with 22 merged_from stamps.

Next

1. Deploy the two tracklet fixes and run the fourth cycle. Neither has touched a GPU. Rebuild the orchestrator image, reset the registry, run vision/identity/reconcile, then re-check the lead's crops. Expect roughly 30 tracklets over 64 crops instead of 12, so identity goes from about 1m25s to 3 or 4 minutes. Watch the lead's assignment count against 36.

   Neither fix is sufficient. Bare hair colour still links different men, and the cat still joins its neighbours. Do not add a crop-to-crop cosine to close that: measured on this run's 22 embeddings, different people reach 0.93 while the same person reaches 0.96, so no threshold exists (caveats/audit-open.md#cosine-not-identity).

   Agreed next step after the cycle, chosen by the user and not started: stop letting cosine pick the gallery. There are 9 live characters. run_stage_identity builds union_cands from the members' cosine top-k shortlists, so a metric that cannot separate people decides who is even considered. Send the live cast instead, gender-gated, capped and logged when truncated. Note 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 and needs a cap; and only a crop with a non-empty cosine shortlist enters shortlists at all, so an empty top-k currently drops the crop from resolution entirely.

   Then, separately, test embedding the FACE box rather than the person box. face_detect already finds the face and pairs it for has_face. That is the likely root cause of cosine measuring scene instead of person, and the test is to re-embed these same 22 detections and recompute the matrix.

2. Order the corners in _bbox_to_pixels. Done 2026-08-12, run and verified on a GPU. 0 degenerate boxes over 119 detections (decisions/identity-bbox.md#bbox-corners-ordered).

3. Vision boxes animals as people and dresses them. p081 and p108 are cats, described short brown / yellow plaid shirt and short brown / white t-shirt. A detection prompt problem, not a linker one, and it feeds every stage below.

4. Detection still names from in-panel text and can hit the wrong body. p011 and p026 emit name: "Seonho" on person_2 with the roster hint gone. That is the residue of the naming defect and the reason the glasses man is named at all (decisions/identity-bbox.md#roster-does-not-name, "not covered").

5. Decide what a back-turned character costs. This is now the whole of the coverage number. has_face gates 40% of detections. On the 18:07 run panel 7 lost 5 of its 6 detections to the gate, and its one face-bearing detection went unassigned. Panel 7's lead is at his desk from behind. face_detect finds one face on the whole panel at conf 0.599, and nothing else above 0.056 even at a 0.04 threshold. The gate is right and the detector is right. The lead is still unidentifiable there. Options are a body or head detector alongside the face one, or letting the tracklet carry identity across a back-turned panel. Do not lower FACE_CONF, the sweep shows nothing to find.

   Smaller follow-on: nine _audio_dur calls in worker_render.py measure finished clips with format=duration. So the durations reported to the orchestrator are blind to per-clip drift. They position no filter, so invariant 9 does not cover them. Worth converting to _stream_dur.

6. Fix identity, in this order. All of 2a-2d below are done and now proven on a GPU. Kept for the evidence trail.

   a. Settle the bbox coordinate space. Done 2026-08-12, proven over all 113 detections and checked by eye on panel 7, where five of six converted boxes land on their subject (decisions/identity-bbox.md#bbox-is-normalized). The rerun settles the last doubt: person_1 now frames the lead at his desk, not the window mullion the pre-fix box caught. b. Let identity abstain and stay abstained. Done 2026-08-12, run and verified on a GPU (decisions/identity-bbox.md#none-mints-an-anonymous-character). The resolver could always answer "none of these". The orchestrator was discarding the answer: it read only character_id, so a deliberate NONE and a hallucinated index both unassigned every crop of the tracklet. A NONE now mints an anonymous character from the crop, using the embedding /identity/resolve ships beside it as emb_uri. Deployed: image rebuilt, resolve_outcome verified inside the container. c. Separate extra from cast. Done 2026-08-12, run and verified on a GPU (decisions/identity-bbox.md#face-gates-enrollment, decisions/identity-bbox.md#extras-gate-consumers). has_face stops a faceless detection enrolling, and two more consumers now skip it: worker_scene's actions, which is the script prompt's content and the verifier's evidence, and service._beat, the director's "who". _present_characters stays ungated on purpose, reasoned out in the decision. The remaining gap is that vision still emits extras into the blob, which is deliberate so the audit can see what was gated. d. Merge and split. Safety net done and now exercised. The 18:07 run merged 9 rows and stamped 22 assignments merged_from:, with no chain deeper than one hop. The non-destructive path and the flattening fix are both proven on real data.

   A merge no longer deletes the losing row: it sets merged_into, and stamps every repointed assignment with method = merged_from:<loser_id>. A wrong merge now costs a hand-written SQL walk, not a full rebaseline (caveats/audit-open.md#destructive-reconcile).

   Deliberately not built: the unmerge path and the split. No wrong merge has been observed since the crops were fixed, so the consumer of those records waits for one. The forward case is partly covered by 2b, because a resolver NONE now mints rather than folding a stranger into the nearest match. Splitting a character that is ALREADY over-merged still needs a re-embed pass over its detections.

   Cast profiles already exist. Do not rebuild them. The user asked whether the main cast could get a profile built from reference frames and reused. characters already carries ref_image_uris and embedding_uri, and every row has both populated (16 rows after the rerun, 53 before it). The mechanism was never missing. It was enrolled from the wrong crops, so it stored balloon edges and window frames. Step (a) fixed that, and the audit now reports 0 characters missing a ref crop. Three things are genuinely absent and are the smaller follow-on:

   • no quality gate on enrollment, so nothing checks that a reference crop holds a face at all
   • nothing re-enrolls a reference set once it is written, so the wrong crops persist

   The visual "is this them?" check is already built. Do not write it again. /vision/resolve at worker_vision.py:963 sends the query crop plus up to 3 labelled reference images per candidate. build_resolve_prompt tells the model to judge face shape first, to treat hair and outfit as secondary, that two people sharing a hair colour are not the same, and to answer 0 for NONE when unsure. choice: 0 becomes a new character, an out-of-range index becomes unresolved, and ref_image_uris is republished as reference_image_uris at worker_identity.py:152 and :161. The mechanism, the prompt and the abstain path are all correct. They are fed crops of the wrong region, which is step (a).

   • no human gate to name, merge or split the clusters. The user wants this as a minor adjustment on top, not as the mechanism. The gates table and the review gates from [#136] are the place to hang it

   The chibi at 1:35 will survive all of this. He genuinely is brown hair plus a yellow shirt, so a profile match is correct on appearance and wrong on reality. That needs item 4 below, plus requiring a real face before a crop can enroll.

7. Stop the narration inventing facts. 0:43, 2:03, 2:05 and 2:15 assert things no panel shows. The correctness verifier passed 116/116 because it checks quotes and names, never invented claims.

8. Teach vision that art inside a panel is not the scene. A chibi on a monitor became "a man holding a drink" at 1:35. A colleague pointing into the distance became "pointing towards the screen" at 1:59.

9. layers writes nothing and reports completed 116/116, so no clip has parallax and a still holds for 28s from 2:24 (caveats/audit-open.md#layers-writes-nothing).

10. Clear the stale job error. The completed job still carries error: "partial: 112/116 completed" (caveats/audit-open.md#stale-job-error).

11. Balloon-to-speaker geometry via the unused det/seg heads (caveats/speaker-attribution.md#tail-is-not-geometry) is now behind item 5. With no name to attach, geometry buys nothing.

12. Resolve a speaker answer across the whole dialogue window, not just the answering panel. The last 3 unresolved refs describe a neighbouring panel in the same 8-panel call.

13. Start Phase 2 from ROADMAP.md. Set SQLite busy_timeout before any concurrency work (caveats/audit-open.md#sqlite-locking).

Lesson worth keeping

Every metric recorded before this session said the pipeline was fine or nearly fine. script 116/116, "9 named speech lines", layers 116/116, assemble 1/1. Watching two and a half minutes of output found a 20% sync failure, a cast that is 84% anonymous, invented narration, and a stage that writes nothing while reporting success. Stage counters measure whether code ran. They say nothing about whether the result is correct. Watch the output before trusting a number.

Running the pieces

./start_workers.sh              # session_manager + 9 workers, each a uvicorn in a tmux window
tmux attach -t manga-workers    # per-worker logs
.venv/bin/python worker_render.py    # self-check, runs real ffmpeg, about 4 minutes

Read the state, or clear a stage and resume:

/usr/bin/ssh kami@192.168.1.104 "curl -s 'http://127.0.0.1:9090/job/status?job_id=778297bc-e7ce-439d-91b5-8a027060d17f'"
/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\":\"778297bc-e7ce-439d-91b5-8a027060d17f\",\"stage\":\"<stage>\"}'"
/usr/bin/ssh kami@192.168.1.104 "curl -s -X POST 'http://127.0.0.1:9090/job/resume?job_id=778297bc-e7ce-439d-91b5-8a027060d17f'"

Traps: tmux respawn-window -k does NOT re-run the window's command, it drops to a bare shell and the worker stays down. Restart one worker by re-sending the send-keys line from start_workers.sh, and confirm with /health plus ./check_stale.sh. docker compose up --build orchestrator recreates the container, which drops any docker cp'd script such as audit_registry.py. Plain ssh is the kitty ssh kitten and refuses non-interactive stdin, so use /usr/bin/ssh. mc aliases on homesrv are homesrv and mio. local returns Access Denied and rfs is the empty rustfs. cp is aliased to cp -i and hangs on overwrite, so use /usr/bin/cp -f.

Re-fixing assembly needs the real clips, which the session scratchpad no longer holds:

/usr/bin/ssh kami@192.168.1.104 'P=homesrv/video/ef105a86-4b7e-4ac4-b45c-b7d83b8f5b5e/7c944dd4-e972-42c7-ba60-9f6939548e80; mc cp -q -r $P/clips/ /tmp/rclips/; cd /tmp/rclips && tar cf - .' | tar xf - -C clips/

Storage and viewer, tasks #116/#117

[#117] is done. stowage serves the manga buckets. It was never a MinIO problem: the container had been dead since 2026-07-19 on an arm64 digest pin.

[#116] is closer but not cut over. Artifacts split one bucket per class (decisions/storage-layout.md#bucket-per-artifact), and both MinIO and rustfs hold all six buckets. rustfs on 127.0.0.1:9010/9011 is still empty and nothing is repointed, so MinIO serves every read and write. Remaining: mc mirror the live buckets, verify counts and sizes, then decide on cutover (decisions/storage-layout.md#rustfs-staged).

Two containers on homesrv had been dead for two weeks and now run. manga-fetch is the one /job/create needs. manga-web is what manga.kvmx.ru proxies to on 8083. Nothing watches them, and nothing watches the workers.

Open questions

Four Phase 1 items have no Vikunja task, because writing to the tracker was not asked for: the speaker contract fix, the verifier rules, the tracklet constraints, and the flag resolution path. Only [#203] existed and is closed by decisions/audit-phase1.md#unlocked-model-load.

Three audit items are deliberately not done and are recorded as caveats rather than silently dropped: honest stage clearing, ComfyUI under the session mutex, and reversible identity merges. Each needs a design decision, not a patch.

Carried over from the reconstruction: .venv needs the ROCm torch wheel reinstalled, and dots.tts/, legacy/, RESUME_SPEC.md, pipeline-design-notes.md, spec-v2.md are unrecoverable.