formatter: linter-guided retry to suppress GPT-5 reasoning drift

GPT-5 is a reasoning model and is not bit-deterministic even at the API
level (no temperature override allowed). Variance testing in iter 7
showed ~1 in 6 loop runs hit a nondeterministic regression: in one run
the magazine_mead exemplar lost its italic markers around "New Yorker"
even though the exact same input had produced a clean output 5 times
prior. The scoring linter caught it (rule_magazine_name_italicized) but
the formatter still emitted the bad output to the user.

This commit adds a runtime guardrail:

- New module src/cmos/runtime_validator.py — type-independent
  structural sanity checks. Operates on a single candidate string
  with no Exemplar context, because at runtime we don't know the
  source type. Checks: ends with period, no Ibid., has at least one
  italic span (almost every CMOS bibliography entry italicizes
  something), balanced * and " markers. Deliberately weaker than the
  scoring linter; it's a fast guardrail, not a full validator.

- format_bibliography_entry now retries up to DEFAULT_MAX_RETRIES (2)
  times when the validator rejects a candidate. Independent re-calls
  are usually enough because the failures are stochastic. If every
  attempt fails, the LAST attempt is returned (no exception) — the
  caller still gets something usable, and the failure surfaces
  through the scoring linter or human review. The retry path costs
  zero on the common case (1 call per entry); ~1-2% extra calls on
  noisy drafts.

Empirical: 3 consecutive loop runs after this change are scalar 1.000
canary 1.000 (vs 5/6 clean in the variance test before). Sample is too
small to claim full suppression but the signal is positive.

Also adds a new exemplar journal_multiauthor_secondary_first_last.toml
captured from the user's HML draft (Hasanah et al., IJIDI 2024). It
exercises the case where a multi-author entry has the first author
inverted and the rest in First Last form — which the iter 7 HML run
got wrong on one entry. Variance testing showed the exemplar passes
6/6 in isolation, so the original HML failure was nondeterminism, not
a missing rule. Keeping the exemplar regardless: it adds canary
coverage of a real-world multi-author pattern, no-DOI / JSTOR-URL
variant, and the year-suffix author-date holdover stripping.

Tests: 85 → 95 (8 new for runtime_validator + 2 new for formatter
retry). All passing.
This commit is contained in:
cmos dev
2026-04-11 01:24:25 -04:00
parent a21d2614d3
commit 8b14dbc9ca
5 changed files with 240 additions and 3 deletions
+37
View File
@@ -81,3 +81,40 @@ def test_formatter_strips_whitespace_from_caller_output():
output = format_bibliography_entry("anything", caller=fake_caller)
assert output == "Yu, Charles. *Interior Chinatown*. Pantheon Books, 2020."
def test_formatter_retries_on_validator_failure():
"""If the runtime validator rejects the first attempt (e.g., italics
missing), the formatter should retry and return a passing later attempt.
Mirrors the iter 7 magazine_mead variance: GPT-5 sometimes drops italics
around a magazine name, and a re-call typically succeeds."""
attempts = []
def flaky_caller(system: str, user: str) -> str:
attempts.append(len(attempts) + 1)
if len(attempts) == 1:
# First attempt: italics dropped (validator should fail).
return 'Mead, Rebecca. "Terms of Aggrievement." New Yorker, December 18, 2023.'
# Retry: clean.
return 'Mead, Rebecca. "Terms of Aggrievement." *New Yorker*, December 18, 2023.'
output = format_bibliography_entry("messy mead", caller=flaky_caller)
assert "*New Yorker*" in output
assert len(attempts) == 2
def test_formatter_returns_last_attempt_after_max_retries():
"""If every attempt fails validation, return the last attempt and don't
loop forever. We surface the failure later via scoring/canary, not by
raising at runtime — the user should still get *something* back."""
attempts = []
def always_bad(system: str, user: str) -> str:
attempts.append(1)
return 'Mead, Rebecca. "Terms of Aggrievement." New Yorker, December 18, 2023.'
output = format_bibliography_entry("messy", caller=always_bad, max_retries=2)
# 1 initial + 2 retries = 3 calls total.
assert len(attempts) == 3
assert "*" not in output # the bad output is what we got