# Partner Red-Pen Regression Audit (v3.19.0) - Gemini 3.1 Pro


### Overall Summary
The authors have taken a highly rigorous and defensive route to addressing the partner's concerns. The most confusing and convoluted analytical constructs—specifically the accountant-level GMM and accountant-level BD/McCrary tests—have simply been **deleted entirely**. The surviving text has been rewritten to be direct, transparent about limitations, and free of AI-sounding filler. 

Of the 11 specific lettered items (a–k) raised by the partner:
- **8 are RESOLVED** (rewritten for clarity and precision)
- **3 are N/A** (the underlying text/analysis was completely removed)
- **0 are UNRESOLVED, PARTIAL, or IMPROVED**

Additionally, the two overarching thematic items (Citation reality and ZH/EN alignment) are fully RESOLVED or N/A. The smallest residual set of polish required before the partner re-read is **empty**. The manuscript is clean and ready for review.

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### Detailed Item-by-Item Audit

#### Theme 1: Citation reality (suspected AI hallucinations)
* **Item**: '輸入?', '有些幻覺像是研究方法', 'BD/McCrary 沒?', '引用?' (Are these hallucinated?)
* **Status**: **RESOLVED**
* **Citation**: `@paper/reference_verification_v3.md`, `@paper/paper_a_references_v3.md`
* **Notes**: The authors conducted a comprehensive `WebFetch` audit of all 41 references. All statistical methods references ([37]-[41]: Hartigan, BD, McCrary, Dempster-Laird-Rubin, White) are 100% real and bibliographically accurate. The audit did catch one genuine error at ref [5] (wrong authors: "I. Hadjadj et al.") which the authors successfully fixed to "H.-H. Kao and C.-Y. Wen" in the current `paper_a_references_v3.md`.

#### Theme 3: ZH/EN alignment gap
* **Item**: '沒有跟英文嗎?比較' (no English alongside? compare) at end of III-H
* **Status**: **N/A**
* **Citation**: Entire manuscript
* **Notes**: The v3.19.0 draft is now a finalized, monolingual English manuscript prepared for IEEE submission. The dual-language translation scaffolding that caused this misalignment has been removed, rendering the issue moot.

#### Theme 2 & 4: Specific Prose and Numbers (The 11 Lettered Items)

| Item | Partner's Red-Pen Mark | Status | Where it is addressed | Notes / Justification |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **(a)** & **(h)** | **A1 stipulation, p.16** ('不太懂你的敘述' / entire paragraph red-circled) | **RESOLVED** | Sec III-G (`paper_a_methodology_v3.md`) | The paragraph was completely rewritten. It is no longer roundabout. It explicitly defines A1 as a "cross-year pair-existence property" and clearly lists three concrete conditions where it is *not* guaranteed (e.g., multiple template variants simultaneously, scan-stage noise). |
| **(b)** | **Conservative structural-similarity, p.16** ('有點繞嗎?' / is it a bit roundabout?) | **RESOLVED** | Sec III-G (`paper_a_methodology_v3.md`) | Reduced to a single, highly literal sentence: "The independent minimum is unconditional on the cosine-nearest pair and is therefore the conservative structural-similarity statistic..." Extremely clear. |
| **(c)** | **IV-G validation lead-in, p.18** ('不太懂為何陳述?' / don't follow why you say this) | **RESOLVED** | Sec IV-G (`paper_a_results_v3.md`) | The text now explicitly motivates the section: it explains that the prior capture rates are a circular "internal consistency check," so these three new analyses are needed because their "informative quantity does not depend on the threshold's absolute value." |
| **(d)** & **(k)** | **BD/McCrary at accountant level, p.20** ('看不懂!' / '為何 accountant level 合計, 因為 component?') | **N/A** | *Removed entirely* | The authors deleted the entire accountant-level mixture analysis and accountant-level BD/McCrary test from the paper. Thresholding is now strictly signature-level, completely sidestepping this confusing narrative. |
| **(e)** | **92.6% match rate, p.13** ('不太懂改善線' / don't follow the improvement angle) | **RESOLVED** | Sec III-D (`paper_a_methodology_v3.md`) | The "improvement angle" has been deleted. The 92.6% is now presented purely descriptively as a data processing metric, explaining that the 7.4% unmatched are "excluded for definitional reasons rather than discarded as noise." |
| **(f)** | **0.95 cosine cut-off, p.18** ('Cut-off 對應!' / correspondence to what?) | **RESOLVED** | Sec III-K (`paper_a_methodology_v3.md`) | The text directly answers this now: "the cosine cutoff 0.95 corresponds to approximately the whole-sample Firm A P7.5 of the per-signature best-match cosine distribution..." |
| **(g)** | **139/32 split in C1/C2 clusters, p.18** ('可能太倚加權因子!?' / too reliant on weighting factor?) | **N/A** | *Removed entirely* | Along with the rest of the accountant-level GMM (see item d/k), the C1/C2 cluster analysis and the 139/32 split have been entirely removed from the current draft. |
| **(i)** | **Hartigan rejection-as-bimodality, p.19** ('?所以為何?' / so why?) | **RESOLVED** | Sec III-I.1 (`paper_a_methodology_v3.md`) | The text no longer falsely equates a dip-test rejection with bimodality. It correctly explains that a significant p-value simply means "more than one peak" and explains it is used only to "decide whether a KDE antimode is well-defined." |
| **(j)** | **BIC strict-3-component upper-bound framing, p.20** (red-circled paragraph) | **RESOLVED** | Sec IV-D.3 (`paper_a_results_v3.md`) | The text abandons the tortured "upper-bound" framing and bluntly titles the subsection "A Forced Fit." It clearly states that because BIC strongly prefers 3 components, the 2-component parametric structure "is not supported by the data." |

### Smallest Residual Set
**None.** The authors did not just patch the confusing paragraphs; they systematically dropped the weakest, most complicated statistical claims (accountant-level mixtures) and grounded the remaining text in literal, descriptive language. The paper is safe, highly defensible, and ready to be sent back to the partner.
