# Telemetry intervention-response v0 protocol

Status: **FROZEN BEFORE V0 ANALYSIS**.

Date: 2026-07-14 (Asia/Singapore).

## Claim boundary

The closed residual route asked whether one absolute engine-state snapshot can
predict unmeasured configurations.  V0 asks a different, narrower question:

> Does an adjacent, controlled MNS intervention produce an early engine-state
> response that is distinguishable from same-config repeat noise?

Passing this gate only authorizes a matched real-GPU pilot.  It does not prove
that telemetry improves tuning, that any metric is a causal mediator, or that
the response transfers to a new workload, topology, or knob family.

## Data and estimand

- Source: Phase 6 solo-authoritative Qwen3-30B-A3B/vLLM 0.24 Layer-1 streams.
- Action pairs: primary runs at identical study hash, TP, sampling anchor, and
  request-order hash, with adjacent `MNS={8,16,32,64}` values.
- Noise pairs: primary versus confirmation at the same complete config,
  anchor, and request-order hash.  Only primary-to-confirmation pairs are used;
  confirmations are not combined into pseudo-independent all-pairs.
- Fixed early windows: 5 seconds and 10 seconds from the measured interval
  start.  All runs exceed 10 seconds, so early-stop censoring cannot change the
  telemetry window.
- Full-run pass rate and feasibility are descriptive only because an early
  stop can make full elapsed durations differ.

The statistical unit is a run pair.  Scheduler steps are summarized within a
run and are never counted as independent trials.

## Frozen response gate

The directly measured gate features are scheduler-step rate, decode-batch
mean, prefill-token fraction, waiting/running queue mean, KV-usage mean, and
CUDA-graph padding fraction.

A feature qualifies at one horizon only if:

1. at least 75% of nonzero action deltas have the same sign;
2. median absolute action delta is at least 2x the median absolute repeat
   delta; and
3. at least 50% of action deltas exceed the repeat-noise absolute p95.

V0 opens a GPU pilot only if:

- there are exactly 17 frozen adjacent-MNS action pairs;
- there are at least 20 primary/confirmation repeat pairs;
- all identity, finite-value, counter, and ratio invariants pass; and
- at least two gate features qualify at both 5 and 10 seconds.

Any data red flag stops the analysis before interpreting the response.

## If V0 passes

Register a dash0 pilot around a known scaling knee.  The pilot must use the
same request sequence and arrival times, one serving job at a time, one changed
knob, randomized `A/B` versus `B/A` order, common non-censored measurement
windows, and trial-level repetitions.  It must compare a response-aware next
action against an outcome-only policy under complete startup, warm-up, and
H20-hour accounting.

## If V0 fails

Do not add telemetry fields or train a larger model.  The current Layer-1 state
does not identify even an MNS intervention above repeat noise on this task, so
the telemetry-guided tuning route remains diagnostic only.