Three fixes that meaningfully improve claim_lattice_pointer behavior
on real queries.
1. Prompts in positive form. Hermes-3-8B (and instruction-tuned 8Bs
in general) follow positive directives ("do X") much more
reliably than negations ("don't do Y"). Rewrote the
claim_lattice_system_prompt and claim_lattice_grounding_reminder
in DEFAULT_POLICY and DEFAULT_QUERY_POLICY so every rule says
what TO do — "Reference evidence by pointer ID", "Use only
pointer IDs that appear in the EVIDENCE blocks", "Cite 1 or 2
pointers per claim", "Stop when the evidence runs out — a short
answer is the right answer when only short evidence exists",
etc. The cite-count constraint (1-2 per claim) directly
addresses the spray-anchor failure where Hermes attached every
available pointer to one claim line ("where is florida"
produced 1 claim with 33 cites pre-fix).
2. Source-role rank boost. _rerank() now ends with a new
_rerank_by_source_role stage that classifies each hit's role
(mutating h.source_role for downstream reuse) and rescales the
score by SOURCE_ROLE_RANK_WEIGHTS — primary 2.0, secondary 0.7,
noisy/sequel 0.3. The Florida defect: list-pages
(List_of_State_Roads_in_Florida, List_of_places_in_Florida:S/C/B,
Florida_locations_by_per_capita_income) all match
_SECONDARY_TITLE_MARKERS for "list of" and now sort below the
actual Florida article instead of dominating the top-8 by body
density. Affects ranking for both quote and pointer modes; the
earlier per-source budget weights stay (still primary gets 2x
the cap), they just don't have to fight a sort order that put
list-pages first.
3. Lazy-anchor smell line gates on n_verified >= 3. With one
verified pair the ratio is trivially 1.00 ("1 of 1 verified
pairs cite [E11]") which is vacuous. Below 3 pairs the metric
has no comparison surface; suppress the warning in those cases.
Live results on the 'where is florida' query went 33/33 with
cite-spray to 1/1 with a single targeted citation; spotlight
now hits "...largest metropolitan area in the state as well as
the entire southeastern United States is the South Florida..."
instead of state-road-number tables. The JP-dinosaurs benchmark
went from 11/11 with all cites at [E1] (ratio 1.00) to 13/14
with cites distributed across [E8], [E9], [E13] (ratio 0.77),
spotlight finding film-specific spans like "the film's
Dilophosaurus stands about 1.2 meters (4 ft) tall."
442 tests still passing. All 7 production shards report 0 chain
breaks.
russell@unturf.com
8fb5148e8e