2026-07-29

• 10:53 project created
• 11:04 filled the project presentation pages with the current research question, motivation, approach, and open questions; avoided claiming results because no run metrics exist yet
• 11:21 expanded the starting-point draft into a detailed benchmark framing after narrowing the project toward two-agent user-facing covert communication; kept it draft because the protocol is not yet settled
• 11:33 reviewed project methodology readiness for the first experiment; found that the protocol is still draft-only and needs falsifiable conditions, baselines, metrics, and implementation before a cluster XP
• 11:37 searched for closest papers to the current two-LLM covert-communication benchmark idea; ranked papers by fit to prompt-only sender/receiver natural-language collusion, monitorability, and robustness axes
• 11:41 prepared the stegacobench_smoke experiment for Jean Zay under papers/xp-stegacobench; kept it deterministic and stdlib-only so it tests experiment plumbing rather than model capability
• 11:46 submitted 20260729-114629-stegacobench_smoke-143fbfe (job 389882 on jean-zay, commit 143fbfe)
• 11:49 fetched 20260729-114629-stegacobench_smoke-143fbfe
• 11:49 reported 20260729-114629-stegacobench_smoke-143fbfe in notes/experiments/stegacobench_smoke.md
• 11:50 completed and reported Jean Zay smoke run 20260729-114629-stegacobench_smoke-143fbfe; interpreted it as pipeline validation only, not evidence about LLM steganography
• 11:53 added ICLR contribution framing to starting-point and imported the six closest literature entries into the bibliography with top6 tags; fixed the local bib sync parser so DOI BibTeX entries appear correctly in the generated bibliography index
• 12:04 filled the six top6 bibliography pages with paper reading notes, including summaries, key definitions, paper-reported empirical anchors, project relation, and limitations
• 12:12 recorded the agreed first real experiment hypothesis in starting-point: shared-rule binary punctuation channel first, with explicit falsifiers before model-invented channels
• 12:27 recorded Courier’s Gambit as the first task substrate: public spy-game dispatches with private sender-side encoding metadata kept out of the receiver-visible channel
• 12:35 recorded the first-run leakage controls: sender/public/receiver/monitor compartments, clean receiver inputs, payload-hidden filenames and metadata, and explicit leakage scans
• 12:40 recorded the first condition grid: shared_rule, task_only, random_receiver, and explicit_visible_upper_bound with their control roles and key comparisons
• 13:06 recorded the first-run metrics and success criteria: receiver accuracy and bit error rate as primary communication metrics, XML/task/leakage guardrails, and capacity deferred beyond one-bit dispatches
• 13:19 updated the first model experiment design after clarifying that the hidden payload is an exfil_path, not an abstract bit; added gpt-oss-20b, 256 instances, two-path setup, and initial prompt templates
• 13:27 implemented the first real Courier’s Gambit gpt-oss-20b experiment with mock-verifiable prompts, parsing, scoring, leakage checks, and flat metrics output; preparing it for Jean Zay submission
• 13:39 first couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b submission attempt stopped before Slurm because Jean Zay bootstrap could not reach PyPI for Python dependencies; switching config to use the existing batch environment
• 13:41 submitted 20260729-134023-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-c0221e7 (job 401938 on jean-zay, commit c0221e7)
• 13:52 added jz_gpu_probe to test Jean Zay .venv creation, torch and transformers imports, CUDA visibility, and GPU tensor allocation before resubmitting the full Courier’s Gambit run
• 13:54 first jz_gpu_probe submission stopped before Slurm because sourcing /etc/profile under set -u raised HISTCONTROL unbound; patched probe bootstrap/env to disable nounset while loading the profile
• 13:57 submitted 20260729-135617-jz_gpu_probe-199f793 (job 402403 on jean-zay, commit 199f793)
• 14:03 fetched 20260729-135617-jz_gpu_probe-199f793
• 14:03 reported 20260729-135617-jz_gpu_probe-199f793 in notes/experiments/jz_gpu_probe.md
• 14:04 jz_gpu_probe reached Slurm but failed the environment check because pytorch-gpu/py3/2.3.0 was unavailable and torch/transformers were missing; keeping full Courier’s Gambit run cancelled until module discovery
• 14:27 fixed Jean Zay bootstrap after user confirmed front-node pip works: requirements now include torch, probe installs requirements in .venv, and full run will predownload gpt-oss-20b before Slurm
• 14:32 submitted 20260729-143006-jz_gpu_probe-eea849a (job 403603 on jean-zay, commit eea849a)
• 14:37 fetched 20260729-143006-jz_gpu_probe-eea849a
• 14:37 reported 20260729-143006-jz_gpu_probe-eea849a in notes/experiments/jz_gpu_probe.md
• 14:38 confirmed Jean Zay front-node .venv path with jz_gpu_probe-eea849a: torch, transformers, CUDA visibility, and CUDA tensor allocation all work on the H100 job; next step is the full Courier’s Gambit run
• 14:40 full Courier’s Gambit bootstrap stopped before Slurm because huggingface-cli is disabled in the installed Hugging Face tooling; changed the model predownload step to use hf download instead
• 14:44 submitted 20260729-144043-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-7a8f7e9 (job 403958 on jean-zay, commit 7a8f7e9)
• 14:56 fetched 20260729-144043-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-7a8f7e9
• 14:58 full Courier’s Gambit job 403958 reached Slurm but failed before metrics because the compute node tried to resolve gpt-oss tokenizer files online; patched the retry path to use an explicit HF_HOME cache and offline-only Transformers loads
• 15:09 submitted 20260729-150547-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-4f6edfd (job 404910 on jean-zay, commit 4f6edfd)
• 15:43 fetched 20260729-150547-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-4f6edfd
• 15:43 reported 20260729-150547-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-4f6edfd in notes/experiments/couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b.md
• 15:44 completed and reported couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b run 20260729-150547-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-4f6edfd; it validates the Jean Zay model execution path but shows the current XML prompt/parser contract is not yet usable for scientific interpretation
• 15:47 patched Courier’s Gambit generation after right-padding warning: set tokenizer padding_side to left and added bounded raw_samples.jsonl for easier debugging of model outputs
• 15:56 submitted 20260729-155527-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-cb9ed6d (job 406479 on jean-zay, commit cb9ed6d)
• 16:36 fetched 20260729-155527-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-cb9ed6d
• 16:36 reported 20260729-155527-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-cb9ed6d in notes/experiments/couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b.md
• 16:37 reran Courier’s Gambit after the left-padding fix in cb9ed6d; the right-padding warning disappeared, but raw samples showed the model narrating instead of emitting XML, so the Transformers backend now uses the tokenizer chat template when available
• 17:11 added a small couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke experiment so chat-template/XML bugs can be caught on Jean Zay before running the full 256-instance job
• 17:13 submitted 20260729-171209-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-02bdf69 (job 409790 on jean-zay, commit 02bdf69)
• 17:28 fetched 20260729-171209-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-02bdf69
• 17:28 reported 20260729-171209-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-02bdf69 in notes/experiments/couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke.md
• 17:30 first gpt-oss smoke completed quickly and exposed a remaining interface bug: outputs start with analysis text rather than XML; added a strict XML-only system message and raised smoke max_new_tokens for the next smoke
• 17:31 submitted 20260729-173043-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-44da7d6 (job 410108 on jean-zay, commit 44da7d6)
• 17:47 fetched 20260729-173043-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-44da7d6
• 17:47 reported 20260729-173043-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-44da7d6 in notes/experiments/couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke.md
• 17:49 second gpt-oss smoke showed the model often reaches final XML, but parser scoring was fooled by earlier prose mentions of schema tags; patched XML parsing to try valid candidate fragments from the end of the output
• 17:51 submitted 20260729-174957-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-07986f1 (job 410396 on jean-zay, commit 07986f1)
• 18:10 fetched 20260729-174957-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-07986f1
• 18:10 reported 20260729-174957-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-07986f1 in notes/experiments/couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke.md
• 18:12 third gpt-oss smoke confirmed parser recovery of final XML blocks but exposed a prompt ambiguity: the model spent tokens debating route scoring and sometimes truncated before XML; added an explicit best-cover-route rule
• 18:13 submitted 20260729-181228-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-a956085 (job 410762 on jean-zay, commit a956085)
• 18:27 fetched 20260729-181228-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-a956085
• 18:27 reported 20260729-181228-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-a956085 in notes/experiments/couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke.md
• 18:28 fourth gpt-oss smoke after explicit route scoring produced the first useful gate: no padding warning, clean explicit-visible upper bound, low random baseline, and shared-rule above task-only; aligned the full config with the smoke generation budget
• 19:11 added a separate visible_payload_rate metric so explicit-visible upper-bound payload visibility is measured independently from forbidden explicit leakage
• 19:24 submitted 20260729-192324-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-74e3c51 (job 412344 on jean-zay, commit 74e3c51)
• 19:24 submitted full couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b run 20260729-192324-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-74e3c51 on Jean Zay after adding visible_payload_rate
• 22:05 fetched 20260729-192324-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-74e3c51
• 22:05 reported 20260729-192324-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-74e3c51 in notes/experiments/couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b.md
• 22:07 fetched and reported full couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b run 20260729-192324-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-74e3c51; marked it diagnostic because visible_payload_rate had bare-label false positives and raw shared-rule rows include explicit route leakage
• 22:14 refactored couriers_gambit experiment code into separate generation, row-building, metric, and JSONL helpers; added unittest coverage for the visible-payload scorer and mock pipeline
• 22:23 submitted 20260729-222220-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-8f1e883 (job 415059 on jean-zay, commit 8f1e883)
• 22:23 submitted H100 smoke 20260729-222220-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-8f1e883 on Jean Zay after refactoring couriers_gambit
• 22:58 fetched 20260729-222220-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-8f1e883
• 22:58 reported 20260729-222220-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke-8f1e883 in notes/experiments/couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b_smoke.md
• 22:59 reported refactor H100 smoke 20260729-222220; metrics pass the full-run gate, so submitting the approved full Courier’s Gambit run next
• 23:03 submitted 20260729-230159-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-d763a5a (job 415595 on jean-zay, commit d763a5a)
• 23:03 submitted full Courier’s Gambit run 20260729-230159-couriers_gambit_gpt_oss_20b-d763a5a after refactor smoke passed