Codex round-18 (paper/codex_review_gpt55_v3_18_3.md) caught a falsified
provenance claim I introduced in v3.18.3 plus four cleaner narrative items
that survived the prior 17 rounds. Verdict was Minor Revision; this
commit closes all 5 actionable items.
- Harmonize signature_analysis/28_byte_identity_decomposition.py to use
accountants.firm (joined on signatures.assigned_accountant) for Firm A
membership, matching the convention in 24_validation_recalibration.py.
Regenerated reports/byte_identity_decomp/byte_identity_decomposition.json.
Cross-firm convergence now reports Firm A 49,389 / 55,922 = 88.32% and
Non-Firm-A 27,595 / 65,514 = 42.12% (percentages unchanged at two
decimal places; counts now match Table IX exactly).
- Replace the Section IV-H.2 reconciliation note. The previous note
speculated that the one-record discrepancy was a snapshot/floating-point
artifact, which codex round-18 falsified by direct DB queries: the real
cause was that script 28 used signatures.excel_firm while Table IX uses
accountants.firm. With script 28 now harmonized, Table IX and the
cross-firm artifact agree exactly at 55,922; the new note documents the
Firm A grouping convention plus the dHash-non-null filter.
- Replace residual "known-majority-positive" wording with
"replication-dominated" in Introduction (contributions 4 and 6) and
Methodology III-I (anchor-rationale paragraph).
- Correct Methodology III-G's auditor-year description: the per-signature
best-match cosine that feeds each auditor-year mean is computed against
the full same-CPA cross-year pool, not within-year only. The aggregation
unit is within-year, but the underlying similarity statistic is not.
- Add the 145 / 50 / 180 / 35 Firm A byte-decomposition sentence to
Results IV-F.1 with explicit pointer to script 28 and the JSON artifact;
this resolves the round-18 finding that several manuscript locations
cited IV-F.1 for a decomposition that was not actually reported there.
- Rebuild Paper_A_IEEE_Access_Draft_v3.docx.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Codex independent peer review (paper/codex_review_gpt55_v3_18_1.md) audited
empirical claims against scripts/JSON reports rather than rubber-stamping
prior Accept verdicts. Verdict: Minor Revision. This commit addresses every
flagged item.
- Soften mechanism-identification language (Results IV-D.1, Discussion B):
per-signature cosine "fails to reject unimodality" rather than "reflects a
single dominant generative mechanism"; framing tied to joint evidence.
- Replace overabsolute "single stored image" with multi-template phrasing
in Introduction and Methodology III-A.
- Reframe Methodology III-H so practitioner knowledge is non-load-bearing;
evidentiary basis is the paper's own image evidence.
- Fix stale section cross-references after the v3.18 retitling: IV-F.* ->
IV-G.* in 11 locations across methodology and results.
- Fix 0.941 / 0.945 / 0.9407 wording in Methodology III-K to use the
calibration-fold P5 = 0.9407 and the rounded sensitivity cut 0.945.
- Soften "sharp discontinuity" in Results IV-G.3 to "23-28 percentage-point
gap consistent with firm-wide non-hand-signing practice".
- Soften Conclusion's "directly generalizable" with explicit conditions on
analogous anchors and artifact-generation physics.
- Add Appendix B: table-to-script provenance map (15 manuscript tables
mapped to generating scripts and JSON report artifacts).
- New script signature_analysis/28_byte_identity_decomposition.py produces
reproducible artifacts for two previously-unverified claims:
(a) 145 / 50 / 180 / 35 Firm A byte-identity decomposition (verified);
(b) cross-firm dual-descriptor convergence -- corrected from the previous
manuscript text "non-Firm-A 11.3% vs Firm A 58.7% (5x)" to the
database-verified "non-Firm-A 42.12% vs Firm A 88.32% (~2.1x)".
- Clarify scripts 19 / 21 docstrings: legacy EER / FRR / Precision / F1
helpers are retained for diagnostic use only and are NOT cited as
biometric performance in the paper. Remove "interview evidence" wording.
- Rebuild Paper_A_IEEE_Access_Draft_v3.docx.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
gbanyan