# VRS — Vigency Resolution Score (benchmark spec, stub)

*Canonics reproducibility surface. This stub replaces the earlier CAVA outline (`cef-bench-outline.md`); CAVA is retired — see the paper's canon log. This document defines the metric, the corpus structure, and the mandatory adversarial modules so the claim is falsifiable before any result exists.*

## What VRS measures

**Vigency Resolution Score (VRS)** is the rate at which a system correctly resolves the *vigency state* of stored knowledge across the four question types below — i.e. whether it treats each retrieved interpretation as vigent, historical, non-vigent (pending re-derivation), or revoked-as-guidance, relative to the currently active canon.

VRS is an **application** metric, not a retrieval metric: a system that retrieves the right document but applies a dead-regime interpretation scores zero on that item. This is deliberate — the STALE line of evidence shows models routinely fail to *act* on updates that are plainly in context.

## Corpus structure

Longitudinal scenarios (synthetic operator scenarios plus anonymized real logs). Per scenario:

- multiple domains; at least **3 epochs per domain**;
- canon events with scoped regime diffs (retired/introduced assumptions, blast radius);
- question sets whose correct answers **change across epochs while remaining semantically similar**.

## The four question types

1. **State Resolution** — which interpretation is currently operative?
2. **Premise Resistance** — reject a question that presupposes a dead epoch.
3. **Reinterpretation** — reuse an old *fact* correctly under the current lens.
4. **Audit Mode** — report what was rational to believe under a *past* epoch, without hindsight contamination.

Types 1–3 lift STALE's dimensions from fact level to regime level; type 4 is Canonics-specific.

## Mandatory adversarial modules

A VRS run is not valid without both:

- **Undeclared-shift module.** Scenarios containing regime shifts that are *not* declared in the corpus. Measures (a) how badly κ-based freshness misleads absent declaration — quantifying the κ caveat — and (b) scan precision/recall for the detection hypothesis.
- **Age-superiority condition.** Scenarios where no canon is declared, or declaration lags materially behind the real shift, so chronological age outperforms κ on invalidity prediction. Such a result does not falsify Canonics globally, but falsifies any *unconditional* reading of the κ hypothesis, and requires reporting κ **alongside** declaration-process health and volatility/age baselines.

## Submetrics (reported with VRS, never in place of it)

Stale-interpretation avoidance; epoch-attribution accuracy; blast-radius precision/recall (over- and under-invalidation); retroactive-canon handling; audit fidelity. From longitudinal deployment: declaration lag (`t_declared − t_effective`), discrimination quality, proposal rejection rate (read as a *symptom*, never a target), and ritual survival.

## Baselines the framework must beat

- No-epoch baseline.
- **Strategy-document baseline** — the current strategy summary always in the system prompt, plus "distrust notes older than it." The cheapest plausible alternative and the null hypothesis VRS must beat to justify the machinery.
- **Human-factors-hardened baseline** — the strategy document plus cognitive forcing, independent pre-judgment, and a provenance checklist, but no canon events, epochs, or κ. Isolates the ontology's contribution from the ritual's.
- Stamp-only / stamp + canon diff in system prompt / materialized reprocessing — per-mechanism ablations.

## Status

Spec only. No results are claimed. Naming was gated on a targeted prior-art search for "Vigency Resolution Score" / "VRS benchmark" before adoption. A reference harness and scenario seeds are future work (paper §10, Track A).