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Codex round-3 verification (commit 9e68f2e) flagged remaining items:
BLOCKER:
- Appendix A Table A.I was inside an HTML comment but visible prose at L1268
and L1275 referenced it as if it rendered. Un-commented Table A.I (same fix
pattern as Tables I-IV in round-3).
MAJOR:
- Table XXVII (diagnostic summary) appeared in §III-M at L593 before Tables
III-XXVI in §IV, breaking sequential IEEE-style numbering. Moved the table
to Appendix A as Table A.II (new §A.2 "Diagnostic Summary"). §III-M now
references "Appendix A Table A.II" instead of hosting the table inline;
§VI Conclusion contribution (8) updated similarly. Appendix A heading
generalised to "Supplementary Diagnostic Detail" with §A.1 (BD/McCrary)
and §A.2 (Diagnostic Summary).
- §III-M L614 rate-definition conflation: the sentence "per-signature and
per-document rates ($0.11$ and $0.34$ respectively under the deployed
any-pair HC + MC alarm)" mixed unit labels. Rewrote to label each rate by
its actual unit and source table: per-signature any-pair HC ICCR ($0.11$;
Table XXII) and per-document HC+MC alarm-rate ICCR ($0.34$; Table XXIII).
MINORS:
- L400 §III-L stale ref retargeted: "operational signature-level classifier
of §III-L" -> "of §III-H.1 calibrated in §III-L".
- L663 §III-L stale ref retargeted: "KDE crossover used in per-document
classification (Section III-L)" -> "(Section III-H.1)".
- L1146 Conclusion "corpus-universal" overstated generality -> "across the
tested eligible scopes" (non-Big-4 evidence is cosine-axis only, not full
calibration scope).
- L1024 Results §IV-M.4 footnote: np.argmax / np.unique implementation
detail moved to "alphabetically-ordered tie-break ... full implementation
detail in the supplementary materials" (less script-internal prose).
Artefacts:
- Combined manuscript regenerated: paper_a_v4_combined.md, 1316 lines.
- Final main-text table sequence: I, II, III, ..., XXVI (26 tables, all
sequential in rendered order). Appendix tables: A.I, A.II.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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# VI. Conclusion and Future Work
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We present a fully automated pipeline for screening non-hand-signed CPA signatures in Taiwan-listed financial audit reports, together with an anchor-calibrated screening framework that characterises the pipeline's operational behaviour at the Big-4 sub-corpus scope under explicit unsupervised assumptions. The pipeline processes raw PDFs through VLM-based page identification, YOLO-based signature detection, ResNet-50 feature extraction, and dual-descriptor (cosine + independent-minimum dHash) similarity computation. The operational output is the deployed five-way per-signature classifier with worst-case document-level aggregation (§III-H.1; calibrated in §III-L). Applied to 90,282 audit reports filed between 2013 and 2023, the pipeline extracts 182,328 signatures from 758 CPAs, with the Big-4 sub-corpus (437 CPAs at accountant level; 150,442–150,453 signatures at signature level) as the primary analytical population.
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Our central methodological contributions are: (1) a composition decomposition that establishes the absence of a within-population bimodal antimode in the Big-4 descriptor distribution: the apparent multimodality dissolves under joint firm-mean centring and integer-tie jitter ($p_{\text{median}} = 0.35$), so distributional "natural-threshold" framings of the deployed operating points are not empirically supported; (2) an anchor-based inter-CPA coincidence-rate (ICCR) calibration at three units of analysis — per-comparison ($0.0006$ at cos$>0.95$; $0.0013$ at dHash$\leq 5$; $0.00014$ jointly), pool-normalised per-signature ($0.11$ for the deployed any-pair HC rule), and per-document ($0.34$ for the operational HC$+$MC alarm) — with explicit terminological replacement of "FAR" by "ICCR" given the unsupervised setting; (3) firm heterogeneity quantification: logistic regression with pool-size adjustment gives odds ratios $0.053$, $0.010$, $0.027$ for Firms B/C/D relative to Firm A reference, indicating a large multiplicative effect that pool-size differences do not explain; (4) cross-firm hit matrix evidence that under the deployed any-pair rule, within-firm collision concentration is $98.8\%$ at Firm A and $76.7$–$83.7\%$ at Firms B/C/D (the stricter same-pair joint event saturates at $97.0$–$99.96\%$ within-firm across all four firms), consistent with firm-specific template, stamp, or document-production reuse mechanisms; (5) K=3 mixture demoted from "three mechanism clusters" to a descriptive firm-compositional partition; (6) three feature-derived scores converging on the per-CPA descriptor-position ranking at Spearman $\rho \geq 0.879$, reported as internal consistency rather than external validation; (7) $0\%$ positive-anchor miss rate on 262 byte-identical Big-4 signatures with the conservative-subset caveat; and (8) explicit disclosure of each diagnostic's untested assumption (Appendix A Table A.II), positioning the system as an anchor-calibrated screening framework with human-in-the-loop review rather than as a validated forensic detector.
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Future work falls in four directions. *First*, a small-scale human-rated labelled set would enable direct ROC optimisation and provide the signature-level ground truth that the present analysis fundamentally lacks; without such ground truth, no true error rates can be reported. *Second*, the within-firm collision concentration documented in §III-L.4 (any-pair $76.7$–$98.8\%$ across Big-4; same-pair joint $97.0$–$99.96\%$) invites a separate study to distinguish deliberate template sharing from passive firm-level production artefacts (shared scanners, common form templates, identical report-generation infrastructure) — a question the inter-CPA-anchor analysis alone cannot resolve. *Third*, the descriptive Firm A versus Firms B/C/D contrast (per-document HC$+$MC alarm $0.62$ vs $0.09$–$0.16$) — together with the byte-level evidence of 145 pixel-identical signatures across $\sim 50$ distinct Firm A partners — invites a companion analysis examining whether such firm-level signing patterns correlate with established audit-quality measures. *Fourth*, generalisation to mid- and small-firm contexts requires extending the anchor-based ICCR framework to scopes where firm-level LOOO folds are not available; the §III-I.4 composition diagnostics already document that the absence of within-population bimodality holds across the tested eligible scopes, so the calibration approach in principle generalises, but a full extension with cluster-robust uncertainty quantification is left as future work.
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