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").
4. **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`.
5. **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.
6. **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.
7. **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.
8. **`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`).
9. **Clear the stale job error.** The completed job still carries `error: "partial: 112/116 completed"`
   (`caveats/audit-open.md#stale-job-error`).
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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

```bash
./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:

```bash
/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:

```bash
/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.