Baseline Ablation Lab

Mission

Design honest baselines and ablations before complex models are accepted.

Primary failure mode prevented: teams ship complex models without proving they outperform simple, cheaper, or safer alternatives.

When To Use

• The team needs a structured go | fix-first | stop | proceed-with-risk | needs-owner-review decision before committing engineering or modeling effort.
• Local artifacts (task type, dataset summary, candidate model, metric) must be audited for red flags such as no naive baseline, single random seed, improvement below uncertainty, cost ignored.
• Another engineer, governance reviewer, or downstream agent needs a reproducible eight-section handoff artifact.

Operating Rules