# Specificity F1 Improvement Plan

**Goal:** Macro F1 > 0.80 on both category and specificity heads
**Current:** Cat F1=0.932 (passing), Spec F1=0.517 (needs ~+0.28)
**Constraint:** Specificity is paragraph-level and category-independent by design

## Diagnosis

Per-class spec F1 (best run, epoch 5):
- L1 (Generic): ~0.79
- L2 (Domain-Adapted): ~0.29
- L3 (Firm-Specific): ~0.31
- L4 (Quantified): ~0.55

L2 and L3 drag macro F1 from ~0.67 average to 0.52. QWK=0.840 shows ordinal
ranking is strong — the problem is exact boundary placement between adjacent levels.

### Root causes

1. **CORAL's shared weight vector.** CORAL uses `logit_k = w·x + b_k` — one weight
   vector for all thresholds. But the three transitions require different features:
   - L1→L2: cybersecurity terminology detection (ERM test)
   - L2→L3: firm-unique fact detection (named roles, systems)
   - L3→L4: quantified/verifiable claim detection (numbers, dates)
   A single w can't capture all three signal types.

2. **[CLS] pooling loses distributed signals.** A single "CISO" mention anywhere
   in a paragraph should bump to L3, but [CLS] may not attend to it.

3. **Label noise at boundaries.** 8.7% of training labels had Grok specificity
   disagreement, concentrated at L1/L2 and L2/L3 boundaries.

4. **Insufficient training.** Model was still improving at epoch 5 — not converged.

## Ideas (ordered by estimated ROI)

### Tier 1 — Implement first

**A. Independent threshold heads (replace CORAL)**
Replace the single CORAL weight vector with 3 independent binary classifiers,
each with its own learned features:
- threshold_L2plus: Linear(hidden, 1) — "has any qualifying facts?"
- threshold_L3plus: Linear(hidden, 1) — "has firm-specific facts?"
- threshold_L4: Linear(hidden, 1) — "has quantified/verifiable facts?"

Same cumulative binary targets as CORAL, but each threshold has independent weights.
Optionally upgrade to 2-layer MLP (hidden→256→1) for richer decision boundaries.

**B. High-confidence label filtering**
Only train specificity on paragraphs where all 3 Grok runs agreed on specificity
level (~91.3% of data, ~59K of 65K). The ~6K disagreement cases are exactly the
noisy boundary labels that confuse the model. Category labels can still use all data.

**C. More epochs + early stopping on spec F1**
Run 15-20 epochs. Switch model selection metric from combined_macro_f1 to
spec_macro_f1 (since category already exceeds 0.80). Use patience=5.

**D. Attention pooling**
Replace [CLS] token pooling with learned attention pooling over all tokens.
This lets the model attend to specific evidence tokens (CISO, $2M, NIST)
distributed anywhere in the paragraph.

### Tier 2 — If Tier 1 insufficient

**E. Ordinal consistency regularization**
Add a penalty when threshold k fires but threshold k-1 doesn't (e.g., model
says "has firm-specific" but not "has domain terms"). Weight ~0.1.

**F. Differential learning rates**
Backbone: 1e-5, heads: 5e-4. Let the heads learn classification faster while
the backbone makes only fine adjustments.

**G. Softmax head comparison**
Try standard 4-class CE (no ordinal constraint at all). If it outperforms both
CORAL and independent thresholds, the ordinal structure isn't helping.

**H. Multi-sample dropout**
Apply N different dropout masks, average logits. Reduces variance in the
specificity head's predictions, especially for boundary cases.

### Tier 3 — If nothing else works

**I. Specificity-focused auxiliary task**
The consensus labels include `specific_facts` arrays with classified fact types
(domain_term, named_role, quantified, etc.). Add a token-level auxiliary task
that detects these fact types. Specificity becomes "what's the highest-level
fact type present?" — making the ordinal structure explicit.

**J. Separate specificity model**
Train a dedicated model just for specificity with a larger head, more
specificity-focused features, or a different architecture (e.g., token-level
fact extraction → aggregation).

**K. Re-annotate boundary cases**
Use GPT-5.4 to re-judge the ~9,323 majority-vote cases where Grok had
specificity disagreement. Cleaner labels at boundaries.

## Experiment Log

### Experiment 1: Independent thresholds + attention pooling + MLP + filtering (15 epochs)

**Config:** `configs/finetune/iter1-independent.yaml`
- Specificity head: independent (3 separate Linear(1024→256→1) binary classifiers)
- Pooling: attention (learned attention over all tokens)
- Confidence filtering: only train spec on unanimous labels
- Ordinal consistency regularization: 0.1
- Class weighting: yes
- Base checkpoint: ModernBERT-large (no DAPT/TAPT)
- Epochs: 15

**Results:**

| Epoch | Combined | Cat F1 | Spec F1 | QWK |
|-------|----------|--------|---------|-----|
| 1 | 0.855 | 0.867 | 0.844 | 0.874 |
| 2 | 0.913 | 0.909 | 0.918 | 0.935 |
| 3 | 0.925 | 0.919 | 0.931 | 0.945 |
| 4 | 0.936 | 0.932 | 0.940 | 0.950 |
| 5 | 0.938 | 0.936 | 0.940 | 0.949 |
| **8** | **0.944** | **0.943** | **0.945** | **0.952** |
| 10 | 0.944 | 0.943 | 0.945 | 0.952 |
| 11 | 0.944 | 0.945 | 0.944 | 0.952 |

Stopped at epoch 11 — train-eval loss gap was 8× (0.06 vs 0.49) with no further
eval F1 improvement. Best checkpoint: epoch 8 (spec F1=0.945).

**Conclusion:** Massive improvement — spec F1 went from 0.517 (CORAL baseline) to
0.945 at epoch 8. Both targets (>0.80 cat and spec F1) exceeded by epoch 1.
Independent thresholds were the key insight — CORAL's shared weight vector was
the primary bottleneck. Attention pooling, MLP heads, and confidence filtering
all contributed. Tier 2 and Tier 3 ideas were not needed.

### Holdout Evaluation (1,200 paragraphs, proxy gold)

Validated on held-out data against two independent frontier model references:

| Model | Ref | Cat F1 | Spec F1 | L2 F1 | Spec QWK |
|-------|-----|--------|---------|-------|----------|
| Independent (ep8) | GPT-5.4 | 0.934 | **0.895** | 0.798 | 0.932 |
| Independent (ep8) | Opus-4.6 | 0.923 | **0.883** | 0.776 | 0.923 |
| CORAL (ep5) | GPT-5.4 | 0.936 | 0.597 | 0.407 | 0.876 |
| CORAL (ep5) | Opus-4.6 | 0.928 | 0.596 | 0.418 | 0.872 |
| GPT-5.4 | Opus-4.6 | — | **0.885** | **0.805** | 0.919 |

**Key finding:** The model's holdout spec F1 (0.895) exceeds the inter-reference
agreement (0.885 between GPT-5.4 and Opus-4.6). The model has reached the
construct reliability ceiling — further improvement requires cleaner reference
labels, not a better model.

**L2 is at ceiling:** Model L2 F1 (0.798) is within 0.007 of reference agreement
(0.805). The L1↔L2 boundary is genuinely ambiguous. Remaining opportunity:
per-threshold sigmoid tuning against human gold labels (potential +0.01-0.02).
