Paper A v3.18.3: address codex GPT-5.5 round-17 self-comparing review findings

Codex round-17 (paper/codex_review_gpt55_v3_18_2.md) re-audited v3.18.2 and
flagged three new issues introduced by the v3.18.2 edits themselves plus
items it had partially RESOLVED but not fully cleaned up. Verdict still
Minor Revision; this commit closes the new findings.

- Fix Appendix B provenance paths: replace four fabricated paths
  (formal_statistical/*, deloitte_distribution/*, pdf_level/*, ablation/*)
  with the actual artifact paths verified in the local report tree.
- Acknowledge that the report tree is at /Volumes/NV2/PDF-Processing/...
  and reviewers should rebase to their own report root rather than rely on
  absolute paths.
- Remove residual "single dominant mechanism" wording from Methodology
  III-H (third primary evidence sentence) and Discussion V-C.
- Fix Methodology III-H Hartigan dip-test parenthetical: "p = 0.17 at
  n >= 10 signatures" wrongly attached the accountant-level filter to the
  signature-level dip; corrected to "p = 0.17, N = 60,448 Firm A
  signatures".
- Soften Introduction Firm A motivation: replace "widely recognized
  within the audit profession as making substantial use of non-hand-signing
  for the majority of its certifying partners" with a methodology-first
  framing that defers to the image evidence reported in the paper.
- Soften Methodology III-H "widely held within the audit profession"
  wording (kept as motivation, marked clearly as non-load-bearing in the
  next sentence).
- Reconcile 55,921 vs 55,922 Firm A cosine-only counts in Section IV-H.2:
  document explicitly that the one-record drift comes from successive DB
  snapshots used to materialize Table IX vs the new script-28 artifact;
  no rate at two decimal places is affected.
- Rebuild Paper_A_IEEE_Access_Draft_v3.docx.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

paper/paper_a_discussion_v3.md

@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ Two convergent strands of evidence support the replication-dominated framing.
 First, the byte-level pair evidence: 145 Firm A signatures (from 50 distinct partners of 180 registered) have a byte-identical same-CPA match in a different audit report, with 35 of these matches spanning different fiscal years.
 Independent hand-signing cannot produce byte-identical images across distinct reports, so these pairs directly establish image reuse within Firm A as a concrete, threshold-free phenomenon, and the 50/180 partner spread shows that replication is widespread rather than confined to a handful of CPAs.
 Second, the signature-level distributional evidence: Firm A's per-signature cosine distribution is unimodal long-tail (Hartigan dip test $p = 0.17$) rather than a tight single peak; 92.5% of Firm A signatures exceed cosine 0.95, with the remaining 7.5% forming the left tail.
-The unimodal-long-tail *shape*, not the precise 92.5 / 7.5 split, is the structural evidence: it is consistent with a single dominant mechanism plus residual within-firm heterogeneity, and a noise-only explanation of the left tail would predict a shrinking share as scan/PDF technology matured over 2013--2023, which is not what we observe (Section IV-G.1).
+The unimodal-long-tail *shape*, not the precise 92.5 / 7.5 split, is the structural evidence: it is consistent with a dominant high-similarity regime plus residual within-firm heterogeneity, and a noise-only explanation of the left tail would predict a shrinking share as scan/PDF technology matured over 2013--2023, which is not what we observe (Section IV-G.1).
 
 Two additional checks, reported in Section IV-G, are robust to threshold choice and complement the two primary strands:
 the held-out Firm A 70/30 validation (Section IV-F.2) gives capture rates on a non-calibration Firm A subset that sit in the same replication-dominated regime as the calibration fold across the full range of operating rules (extreme rules are statistically indistinguishable; operational rules in the 85--95% band differ between folds by 1--5 percentage points, reflecting within-Firm-A heterogeneity in replication intensity rather than a generalization failure), and the threshold-independent partner-ranking analysis (Section IV-G.2) shows that Firm A auditor-years occupy 95.9% of the top decile of similarity-ranked auditor-years against a 27.8% baseline share---a 3.5$\times$ concentration ratio that uses only ordinal ranking and is independent of any absolute cutoff.