- the cleaned real badge fixture in `tests/fixtures/real/ai-badge-cleaned.png` still beats naive resize on source-lattice consistency on the continuous path
- the latest full-emblem tile-graph atomic probe under `artifacts/full-emblem-tile-graph-atomic-v3-cuda/` lands at `0.0224` source-fidelity, beating the older full-emblem tile-graph CUDA baseline at `0.0283`
- the new algorithm map in `docs/tile-graph-algorithm-map.md` confirms that the pinned `126x126` tile-graph badge collapse is already present in the tile-graph initial assignment; the fixed-lattice pipeline path itself is reproducing that bad state faithfully rather than introducing it, and the newer extraction coverage fix now guarantees that occupied output cells are not silently losing their source-region bucket under the corrected full-size lattice mapping
This pass is the first pruning pass after the new algorithm map: strip away the optimizer-era sidecars that are not part of the core tile-graph machine.
- the earlier profiling result still stands: on the searched badge path, the solver loop is not the problem; the heavy costs are `infer_lattice(...)`, continuous-mode phase rerank probes, and `_extract_source_region_tiles(...)`
- the direct-control path is specifically for dodging those costs during iteration when we already know which lattice we want to inspect
- tile-graph now skips pipeline rerank entirely, so iteration no longer rebuilds multiple probe candidates before the final tile-graph solve
- on the cleaned badge at pinned `126x126` / phase `(0.0, -0.2)`, a fixed-lattice CUDA `tile-graph` run now took about `10.2s` on the first same-process run and about `2.1s` on the cached rerun, with the same output and a reported `tile_graph_model_cache_hit` on the second pass
- the current deep-dive diagnosis is that the fixed-lattice garbling is not a wrapper bug and not mainly a parity-solver bug; it is being born in lattice-conditioned reference building, source-region cutting/projection, candidate starvation, and the first unary argmin assignment
- the extraction coverage bug turned out to be real but secondary: the new `_extract_source_region_tiles(...)` overlap fill pass now guarantees that any output cell containing opaque sampled source pixels gets at least one extracted region bucket, but the pinned `126x126` badge output remains numerically unchanged (`0.4998626`), which narrows the remaining failure to candidate ranking and lattice-conditioned reference usage rather than empty region buckets
- the latest full-emblem atomic probe under `artifacts/full-emblem-tile-graph-atomic-v3-cuda/` lands at `0.0224` source-fidelity with `34278` candidates and about `2.16` average choices per cell
- that beats the earlier full-CUDA tile-graph baseline (`0.0283`) and materially improves on the first atomic-only attempt (`0.1571`), which chose atomic regions too eagerly and then let the solver blur them out again
- split tile-graph iteration into a cached model-build phase and a near-free solve phase so weight tuning does not keep paying the `~131s` source-region cutting bill
- extend the current fixed-lattice path so repeated CLI runs can reuse cached model artifacts across processes instead of only within one Python process
- decide whether the continuous path should stay the only global search/rerank engine or whether tile-graph eventually needs its own lighter lattice chooser
- evaluate whether the tile-graph propagation loop should become more contour-aware or simply stay more conservative now that the initial assignment is stronger
- rerun tuning after the tile-graph objective and candidate sets stabilize
- decide whether the tile-graph path should stay an alternate solver or become a candidate generator for the continuous refine stage
- the right side of the sword tip can still wobble instead of tapering cleanly
- thin oblique outline features can still collapse into mushy transitions
- the right-hand guard wing can still lose short dark-light-dark adjacency motifs
- on tile-graph specifically, the remaining failure is less about wrong colors entering the candidate pool and more about the propagation step preferring a smoother local arrangement than the sharper initial assignment
- on the cleaned fixture, the continuous path now lands at `0.0832` source-fidelity in the reproducible probe under `artifacts/badge-final-probe/`, which is materially better than the older documented `0.1494` result and better than naive resize under the same lattice
- on the full emblem, the tile-graph atomic path under `artifacts/full-emblem-tile-graph-atomic-v3-cuda/` now reaches `0.0224`, which is the best tile-graph full-emblem result so far in this repo
- the remaining weakness on tile-graph is not candidate color purity anymore; it is candidate extraction cost plus deciding how aggressive the propagation step should be once the initial assignment is already strong
- on the cleaned badge, the new CCL-backed tile-graph run under `artifacts/badge-tile-graph-ccl-cuda/` still lands at a weak `0.1800`, so the current CCL work should be treated as an infrastructure/performance step rather than a visual-quality fix
- the new stroke-aware badge run under `artifacts/badge-tile-graph-stroke-v2-cuda/` still does not solve the guard-contour problem and slightly regresses to `0.1832`, so the next stroke pass should be judged on whether it changes the source-side path model more fundamentally
- older searched-path profiling showed that iteration was dominated by preprocessing work rather than the tile-graph parity solver: about `44.1s` in inference, `223.9s` in low-confidence rerank probes, and `142.3s` in the final selected-candidate build; the pruned tile-graph path no longer pays those rerank probes, but `_extract_source_region_tiles(...)` is still the heavy remaining step
- that background rhythm is expected from resampling the background pattern and should not be mistaken for proof that the inferred lattice itself is varying in size
