EMEP Project Constitution: Scientific Rules

The 20 non-negotiable scientific rules governing EMEP design, evaluation integrity, and reproducibility. Each rule includes a one-line rationale.

The Project Constitution defines the scientific and engineering constraints that govern EMEP. These rules are non-negotiable. Every design decision, experiment protocol, and implementation choice must satisfy them.

The 20 Rules

ID	Rule	Rationale
CONST-01	All merge operations are tensor-level, not architecture-level	Guarantees mathematical correctness and reproducibility
CONST-02	Compatibility analysis precedes every merge	Prevents silent failures from mismatched shapes or tokenizers
CONST-03	Safetensors is the primary artifact format	Enables memory-mapped loading, fast I/O, and security scanning
CONST-04	Every artifact is signed with ed25519	Establishes non-repudiable provenance for supply chain integrity
CONST-05	The Hidden Test Set is never used by EvolutionEngine	Prevents overfitting the evolutionary search to test data
CONST-06	Benchmark splits are immutable after experiment creation	Ensures reproducibility and prevents data leakage
CONST-07	Evaluation results are tagged with evidence levels	Distinguishes established research from experimental hypotheses
CONST-08	Multi-objective optimization uses Pareto dominance	Captures trade-offs between accuracy, size, latency, and safety
CONST-09	Population diversity is enforced at every generation	Prevents premature convergence in evolutionary search
CONST-10	Candidate models pass regression tests before promotion	Guarantees that merged models do not degrade base capabilities
CONST-11	Experiment state transitions are append-only logs	Provides complete audit trails for every experiment
CONST-12	Model lineage is tracked from import through deployment	Enables rollback, attribution, and compliance reporting
CONST-13	Enterprise mode operates without external network access	Satisfies air-gapped deployment requirements
CONST-14	Semantic versioning applies to all Enterprise Models	Communicates breaking changes and compatibility guarantees
CONST-15	Documentation precedes implementation for every component	Enforces design clarity and reduces technical debt
CONST-16	All algorithms are specified with Mermaid flowcharts before coding	Ensures shared understanding between research and engineering
CONST-17	Python 3.11 is the reference runtime	Standardizes the development environment and dependency graph
CONST-18	PyTorch is the reference tensor engine	Provides the de facto standard for open-weight model operations
CONST-19	GPU orchestration is explicit, not implicit	Prevents resource contention and enables cost accounting
CONST-20	Failure modes are documented before mitigation code	Ensures that safeguards address real, identified risks

Primary Research Loop

The primary loop (bold outline) is mandatory. Fine-tuning and RAG (dotted lines) are optional downstream additions.

Evidence Tags

Every claim in this constitution is tagged:

• Established research: Supported by peer-reviewed literature
• Engineering assumption: Pragmatic choice without formal proof
• Research hypothesis: Predicted but not yet validated
• Future goal: Target state, not yet implemented

Next Steps

See the Glossary for definitions of all terms used above, or Decisions for the architectural decision records that operationalize these rules.