ARCHITECTURE — THE PIPELINE

Run until it breaks.
Then mint the seal.

Nucleus is the production pipeline that turns frontier-model reasoning into a permanent, signed Super Skill Model. Seven stages, four agents in adversarial loop, three certification gates, and one Ed25519 provenance chain. The pipeline never stops on a schedule — it stops when the swarm exhausts every failure mode it can find.

01 · CORPUS + MANIFEST02 · 7-LAYER EXTRACTION03 · SYMBOLIC REASONING04 · FINE-TUNING05 · ADVERSARIAL LOOP06 · CERTIFICATION07 · NUCLEUS SEALINGESTKICE + TICESCoTD + CoTDSFT + RAFTSWARM3-GATESEALrun until convergence ⟳pedagogical phase — v1.N continuesv1.0Click a phase to inspect it.7-stage distillation pipeline. Adversarial loop runs until convergence. Three gates before any Seal is minted.

PHASE 05

SWARMAdversarial Loop

Run-until-it-breaks. Four agents try to make the model fail.

nucleus.swarm.*

The Pedagogical Phase's adversarial layer. Interrogator generates probes, Adversary crafts traps, Evaluator scores responses, Corrector amends weak spots. AutoResearch evolves the rubric. The loop runs until convergence — no time limit, no epoch count. The model graduates when the swarm gives up trying to break it.

INPUTS

  • Trained student
  • AutoResearch rubric

OUTPUTS

  • Probes, traps, scores, corrections
  • Convergence signal

TECHNIQUES

  • · Interrogator — generates probes
  • · Adversary — designs traps
  • · Evaluator — scores responses
  • · Corrector — amends weak spots
  • · AutoResearch — evolves rubric

DEEPER — WHAT MAKES THIS WORK

KICE + TICE

7 layers, parallel extraction

Layers 1–6 are certifiable knowledge — KICE's domain. L7 is tacit, undocumented expertise — TICE's. Both are NemoBots with deterministic execution graphs, Lance checkpointing, and OpenTelemetry spans for every step.

ADVERSARIAL SWARM

4 roles · run until convergence

Interrogator → Adversary → Evaluator → Corrector. AutoResearch evolves the rubric and never gets merged into another service. No epoch count, no time limit. The model graduates when the swarm gives up trying to break it.

THREE-GATE CERTIFICATION

All three pass, or no Seal

Gate 1 — General regression (≥85% of base on MMLU/HellaSwag/ARC/GSM8K/IFEval). Gate 2 — Domain mastery (HELM + LLM-Judge vs teacher holdout). Gate 3 — Hallucination audit (HalluLens, <2% rate, 0 fabricated entities, ≥90% out-of-domain refusal).

NUCLEUS SEAL

Ed25519 cryptographic DNA

Teacher SHA-256 + Corpus Hash + Pipeline Config + Nucleus Audit + AutoResearch Report. Signed. Yours, forever — and instantly revocable if a downstream issue is found. The Seal is proof the pipeline did what it claims.

FORK POINT — v1.0 vs v1.N

Pedagogical phase keeps cycling

When the Seal is minted, two threads run: v1.0 ships immutably to the user, and the Pedagogical Phase keeps cycling toward v1.N. Hybrid Versioning + Regression Gate guarantees v1.N is minted only if it scores ≥ v1.(N-1) on the prior gate set.

THREE MODES

Domain · User-Data · Hybrid

Mode 1 compresses the teacher's existing knowledge. Mode 2 has the teacher reason over your proprietary data — creating intelligence that never existed before. Mode 3 is both. The manifest declares the mode and reshapes the entire pipeline.

ACADEMIC FOUNDATIONS

SCoTDSymbolic Chain-of-Thought Distillation — Li et al., ACL 2023
SCOTTSelf-consistent CoT with contrastive decoding — Wang et al., ACL 2023
RAFTRetrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning — Zhang et al., UC Berkeley 2024
Distilling Step-by-StepHsieh et al., ACL 2023 — small models beat 540B PaLM
Adversarial MM DistillationNeurIPS 2024 — moment-matching alignment
Self-Play Fine-TuningChen et al., 2024 — convergence-based graduation
AirLLMGavin Li 2023 — layer-by-layer inference
CoT PromptingWei et al., NeurIPS 2022 — reasoning emerges with structure
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