BuildFeatureWindow() replaces eight hand-rolled copies of the same loop
and feeds the window OLDEST BAR FIRST. Every copy fed it newest-first,
because MQL5 timeseries indices run backwards and `r + b` with b ascending
walks into the past.
Harmless for PAI and CONV - a dense layer learns a weight per position
either way, a conv learns time-mirrored kernels. Not harmless for the
recurrent stacks:
- LSTM_SeqStepForward reads `inputs + t*Iw`, so step t is block t.
- It writes output[] only when t == steps-1: the visible output IS the
last hidden state.
- c_t = f*c_{t-1} + i*g decays toward the start of the sequence.
lstm_seq_flowcheck.cpp measured block 0's influence on the output at
1.2e-2 of block T-1's, at the shipped forget bias of 1.0.
So the bar being PREDICTED sat at the far end of the decay and the output
was handed to the OLDEST bar in the window - the exact inverse of what the
window is for. ~80x backwards on LSTM and HYBRID, on all three tiers
(OpenCL kernel, CPU DLL, pure-MQL5 inference), which is why it never
surfaced as a backend discrepancy.
This does not create edge - the MI diagnostics read at the noise floor
(p=0.4975) with a working positive control. It makes the one hypothesis
those diagnostics explicitly do NOT cover testable: they are marginal and
per-bar, and state they "cannot rule out one that only exists in
combination or across time". The sequence model is the instrument for
across-time structure and it has been crippled, so that hypothesis has
never been honestly tested.
Fingerprint gets an unconditional |WIN:2 - the vector keeps its shape and
its features, so a stale .nnw would load cleanly and run a model fitted to
one ordering against the other, silently. Re-keying every config is the
point, not collateral damage. FORCES A FULL RETRAIN.
Also: the now-relative bar caches are re-keyed on the two live paths.
EnsureBarCachesCapacity() was only ever called from training paths, but
once m_trainingComplete is set ScheduleTrainingIfNeeded() routes every bar
to RefreshConvergedSignal() and Train() is never re-entered - so nothing
cleared the feature cache again for the life of the process. A chart that
trained to convergence kept replaying the rows computed for the last
training era's bar grid: the live signal froze at its convergence-time
value, and OnlineLearnStep() backpropped those stale features against
freshly resolved labels. Backtests were never affected (an inference-only
process never allocates the arrays, so every read recomputes).
Compiles clean: 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- BufferDouble: replace hardcoded "DirectML/CPU-DLL" with dynamic backend name
and add buffer index/element count to all error prints for easier debugging.
- NetPersistence: distinguish missing file from transient lock by probing
FileIsExist before logging, eliminating false "sharing violation" warnings
when no saved model exists on first run.
Adds spread/ATR and the spread change ratio as network inputs (EnableSpreadFeature,
default on). Spread is the one microstructure channel that is both FX-available and
genuinely historical in the Strategy Tester - "during testing, the spread is not modeled
but is taken from historical data" - so unlike swap, signed tick flow or depth of market it
is something a backtest can honestly validate.
What it encodes, stated precisely because the raw measurement overstates it.
research/test_spread.py found spr/atr the strongest single feature in this codebase, on 5
of 8 instrument/geometry cells at 2-4x any volume feature. But the barrier LABEL charges
the spread inside its own barriers, so a wide-spread bar is mechanically likelier to
resolve as a loss and the feature would partly be predicting its own cost model. Relabelling
at zero cost and re-measuring the identical feature showed 20-40% of it WAS that tautology
and the majority was not (XAUUSD retained 97%). What survives is a volatility-regime
reading: spread is near-fixed while ATR is not, so the ratio runs high exactly when
realised volatility is below its own ATR estimate, which genuinely predicts whether
ATR-scaled barriers get reached. It is UNSIGNED - Neutral-vs-directional only, never a side.
Also fixes a stale-index bug I introduced with the cross-asset panel and had just repeated
in the spread series. Both cached on length alone:
if(m_crossAsset.Bars() >= bars) return true;
MQL5 series indices are relative to NOW, so one new closed candle shifts every index by
one. Keyed only on length, the panel keeps serving its index 0 as a bar that is no longer
the newest, and every cross-asset value is read one bar out of step with the price features
sitting beside it in the same vector - silently, with no error and no shape change. This is
the same class of defect as the dtStudied watermark behind the zero-direction backtests.
Both now carry a datetime anchor on m_Time.GetData(0), the same invalidation key the
label/feature bar caches already use.
And a performance fix that fell out of it: with correct invalidation the panel rebuilds on
every new bar, and RefreshConvergedSignal runs per bar - which in the tester would mean one
full multi-symbol resample per simulated bar at training depth. Inference only reads bars
0..m_historyBars-1 plus the panel's own slow window, so it now requests exactly that. The
cache check is >=, so a deeper panel left from training still satisfies it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two defects surfaced by research/test_classic.py, both verified fixed by re-running the
transcription against 178k bars of EURUSD H1.
CSignalMA model 1 could never fire. For any recursive average - and MA_TYPE_EMA is the
shipped default - MA(i) = a*Close(i) + (1-a)*MA(i+1), so
DiffMA(i) = a * (Close(i) - MA(i+1))
DiffCloseMA(i) = (1-a) * (Close(i) - MA(i+1))
are positive multiples of one quantity and always share a sign. Model 1 asks for a close
BELOW a RISING average, which is precisely the combination that identity forbids: 0.000%
of bars, either direction, any symbol. The MQL5 standard library this was ported from
defaults to MODE_SMA, where the two are merely correlated - the bug arrived with the EMA
default, not with the port. Reading the slope one bar back (DiffMAPrev) breaks the tie for
every MA type while keeping the model's stated meaning. Now fires on 7.92% of bars.
CSignalIchimoku model 11 fired on 27% of bars at weight 100. Sanyaku is three standing
STATES conjoined with no transition term, so it held across long stretches - and being
last in the if-chain at the top weight, the module's highest-conviction reading was also
its most common one, overwriting all eight event models below it on a quarter of all bars.
The old comment rejected an event form because "demanding all three flip on the same bar
would fire almost never" - true, but that is not the alternative. Kouten is the TURN: the
ALIGNMENT transitions, and only one role need change for it to. Testing !Sanyaku(idx+1)
fires once per aligned stretch. Now 2.17%, in line with Kumo breakout (2.4%) and the
strong TK cross (1.1%). DataReady() extended one bar deeper to cover the lookback.
Neither pattern showed edge before or after; this is about the models meaning what they
say and the vote not being dominated by a constant.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"Abnormal termination" is back, and this time it is not the arrows. The
timing names the culprit exactly:
16:02:31.547 OnDeinit: shutting down
16:02:36.003 Abnormal termination <- 4.46 s, MetaTrader gave up
16:02:36.226 chart signals - persisted <- cleanup finished 0.2 s LATE
OnDeinit called StopTraining() BEFORE the chart cleanup. StopTraining()
finalises an in-flight run, and FinalizeTrainRun() restores the best
checkpoint and then persists it - a full ~1MB model write per signal. So
the expensive step ran ahead of the cheap bounded one, which is precisely
the inversion the shutdown ordering exists to prevent. The previous fix
put PersistWeightsOnShutdown last and missed that StopTraining smuggles a
second save in at the front.
Two changes:
Cleanup now runs FIRST, then StopTraining, then the weight save. The
visible teardown is cheap and bounded, so it always completes even when
everything after it is killed.
And the deploy-persist inside FinalizeTrainRun is suppressed during
shutdown. RestoreWeights() is an in-MEMORY swap, so the best checkpoint
is already the live net by that line, and PersistWeightsOnShutdown writes
exactly those weights moments later. The old path wrote the same model
twice per signal - eight full writes across four charts - for no benefit.
A user-pressed Stop still persists immediately, because nothing else
would.
Compiles 0 errors / 0 warnings. Build tag deinit-order-v2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
THE TUNER WAS A SILENT NO-OP. Every chart logged
auto-tune complete - 17 candidate settings scored in ~139s,
feature/label mutual information 0.0000 -> 0.0000 nats (no improvement)
0.0000 is not a weak result, it is a broken measurement: finite-sample MI
is biased UPWARD, so even pure noise scores above zero. Cause:
ScoreCurrentParamsByMI called BufferTempDataCompute(), which APPENDS the
bar's features to TempData and never touches m_featureCache - only the
caching wrapper BufferTempData() writes that array. It then read
m_featureCache, which ReInitADIndicators had just invalidated. Every
column came back constant, FeatureColumnMI returned 0 for all of them,
and all 17 candidates tied at exactly zero. 139 s per chart to return the
settings it started with.
Now reads the values back out of TempData, where they actually land. And
an exactly-zero best score is called out as a fault rather than reported
as "no improvement", because that is what it is.
ADDED: a PERMUTATION BASELINE, which is the diagnostic this project has
been missing. MI's finite-sample bias is ~(bins-1)(classes-1)/(2n) nats -
at these sample sizes the same order as any real edge in this domain - so
a raw MI figure is uninterpretable on its own. Shuffling the labels
destroys every genuine association while leaving sample size, binning and
class proportions intact, so the score it produces IS this dataset's
noise floor, measured rather than approximated. The log now reads
feature/label information - X nats against a shuffled-label floor of Y
and says outright whether the features carry usable information about the
target. It needs no training, no topology and no convergence, so unlike
every accuracy number in this codebase it cannot be confounded by an
optimizer or an objective. If the score sits on the floor, no change of
architecture can help - which is the question the last three days of
zero-edge results have been circling.
DEPLOY FLOOR: `dirPrecPct > chancePrecPct` passed anything above chance by
any amount. At ~11,000 directional calls the standard error of the
precision estimate is ~0.4pp, so that gate was accepting sub-one-sigma
noise - the perceptron deployed at edge +0pp on 2026-08-01. Now requires
EDGE_MIN_SIGMAS (2.0) standard errors above chance, computed from the
actual call count, so the bar scales with the evidence instead of needing
a hand-picked constant.
Recorded with it, because it is why chance is the right reference at all:
under a driftless random walk P(touch +k*ATR before -m*ATR) = m/(m+k),
and the break-even win rate for a k:m reward:risk trade is ALSO m/(m+k).
The label's own base rate IS the break-even rate, at every SL/TP setting.
So "beats chance" and "is profitable" are the same test, and no choice of
SL/TP can manufacture an edge - only prediction can.
Both builds compile 0 errors / 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Moves CLayer neuron construction to AI/Impl/Layer.mqh to keep Network.mqh clean
- Unifies four previously duplicated architecture initialisation blocks (MLP/CONV/LSTM/HYBRID) into a single shared function
- Eliminates risk of behavioural drift where one architecture missed a setter, causing mismatched feature sets or targets
Reported as "the perceptron correctly cleaned its chart on deinit, the
other 3 did not, abnormal termination". Measured from the 2026-08-01 log,
time from "OnDeinit: shutting down" to MetaTrader force-terminating:
PAI 3.75 s -> survived, chart cleaned
CONV 4.71 s -> Abnormal termination
LSTM 4.28 s -> Abnormal termination
HYBRID 4.16 s -> Abnormal termination
In all four the last line printed is the inference census, which is the
end of StopTraining() - so the overrun is inside ShutdownChartCleanup(),
i.e. between saving the arrows and purging them.
The cost is the prune loop at the end of SaveChartSignals():
for(int i = 0; i < prunedCount; i++)
ObjectDelete(0, SIG_ARROW_PREFIX + TimeToString(pruned[i]));
ObjectDelete is O(objects) on a crowded chart, so this is O(n^2). It was
harmless while the model called a direction on ~6% of bars. After the
triple-barrier relabel the models call on 83-94% of bars, the chart
carries many thousands of arrows, and the loop overran MetaTrader's
OnDeinit budget - so PurgeChart() never ran and the arrows stayed on
screen. The slow tidy-up starved the fast one.
The work was pure waste at that moment: ShutdownChartCleanup purges every
arrow with a single bulk ObjectsDeleteAll immediately afterwards.
Deleting them one at a time first has no effect except to prevent the
bulk delete from happening at all.
SaveChartSignals takes a pruneChartObjects flag, and the two shutdown
call sites pass false:
- ShutdownChartCleanup passes `preserveChartArrows`, which is exactly
right: prune when the arrows are STAYING (chart and sidecar must
agree), skip when they are about to be purged wholesale.
- FinalizeTrainRun passes !m_trainingStopRequested. Removing a chart
MID-ERA reaches StopTraining -> FinalizeTrainRun, which took the
expensive path a second time, even earlier, before anything had been
cleared. Same defect one call site up; it only escaped notice because
the observed removals happened to land between eras.
Normal convergence and the live per-era path are unchanged - they still
prune, which is what keeps the chart object count bounded.
This also restores the invariant the 2026-07 fix intended ("chart cleanup
runs BEFORE the heavy weight save so a stall cannot leave the chart
littered"). That fix moved cleanup ahead of the WEIGHT save, but cleanup
had since grown its own slow step ahead of its own fast one.
Both builds compile 0 errors / 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
MEASURED COST OF THE GA, which is what retired it. Per generation:
rung 0: 8 cand x 3 seeds x 3 eras = 72 eras
rung 1: 4 cand x 3 seeds x 8 eras = 96
rung 2: 2 cand x 3 seeds x 20 eras = 120
= 288 eras/generation x 4 generations = 1152 eras BEFORE the winner's
real training began. Against the observed era times on SP500 H1:
PAI 29.1 s/era -> 9.3 h (matches the observed 00:37 -> 09:22)
CONV 41.3 s/era -> 13.2 h
LSTM 150.4 s/era -> 48.1 h
HYBRID 154.6 s/era -> 49.5 h
Two days to tune is not a first-run experience, and it is the phase in
which the panel goes quiet, which is what made it look like a hang.
It also bought nothing. The space is 90 points (10 MA periods x 9 MA
types), so 1152 evaluations revisited each point ~13 times; and rungs of
3 and 8 eras cannot separate two MA periods at all. The 2026-08-01 run
proves it: every finalist scored 25.0-25.9% balanced accuracy - below the
33.3% one-class floor, i.e. indistinguishable noise - and the search then
"deployed the winner" of that.
THE ERROR WAS THE SCORING FUNCTION, not its constants. Using a full
training run to choose a feature's period is a wrapper method paying
wrapper prices for a decision that does not need one. The reference book
does not do this: ch. 3.3 selects inputs by measuring each candidate
indicator's CORRELATION with the target and dropping the ones with none,
with no network involved.
So: rank candidates by the MUTUAL INFORMATION between the resulting
feature vector and the triple-barrier label. MI rather than correlation
because the label is 3-class categorical and the features are not
monotonically related to it. Equal-FREQUENCY binning (rank-based),
because these features are ATR-normalised and heavy-tailed - fixed-width
bins put nearly everything in one bucket and report ~0 information for a
genuinely useful feature.
Scoring is arithmetic over the feature cache, so it costs seconds and its
cost is independent of topology: LSTM now tunes as fast as the MLP.
Coordinate sweep, not product sweep - cost is the SUM of per-parameter
candidate counts, so enabling every indicator stays affordable - with a
second pass that breaks early once nothing moves.
Sampling is IS-ONLY. Letting the OOS window influence which indicator
settings ship would mean the holdout had been used for selection and had
stopped being a holdout.
HONEST LIMIT, recorded because it is the price: MI is marginal, so a
parameter that only pays off in combination with another can be missed
(Guyon & Elisseeff 2003, filter vs wrapper). Given the wrapper it
replaces was ranking pure noise at 48 h a run, this is strictly better.
Deleted with it: GaRungEras/GaExtract/GaStore/GaMutate/GaRandomCandidate/
GaBlockCrossover/GaSortAliveByScoreDesc/GaBreedNextGeneration, 14 m_ga*
members, the GA_*/TUNE_POP_* constants, and ComputeTuneTrialBudget.
AND m_evalMode/m_evalEraBudget, because nothing set them any more - 28
read sites all permanently inert. That is not a tidy-up: the `if
(!m_evalMode)` guard on UpdateClassPriors is exactly what silently
disabled the imbalance correction for entire runs two commits ago. Dead
machinery that still reads like live machinery is this codebase's most
expensive recurring bug, and leaving 28 more instances of it would have
been indefensible.
The panel's tuning-progress state goes too - tuning no longer takes long
enough to need one.
Both builds compile 0 errors / 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Neutral collapse on all four topologies by era 5 with a 2:6 barrier
(recall Buy 0% / Sell 0% / Neutral 100%), and the panel stuck on
"measuring...". One root cause, and it was not the barrier.
The labels were fine: Buy 25.4% / Sell 22.0% / Neutral 52.5%, which is
exactly gambler's ruin for m=2,k=6 (2/8 = 25% per side), with only 0.1%
of Neutral coming from the vertical barrier - so the new m*k horizon
scaling is right, arguably generous.
What was broken: Train()'s era-start block wrapped UpdateClassPriors() in
`if(!m_evalMode)`. The auto-tune GA scores every candidate in eval mode,
and AutoTuneIndicators ships ON, so on a default configuration EVERY era
of the search ran with unmeasured priors. ApplyLogitAdjustment() requires
measured priors; without them it calls ClearLogitAdjustment() and returns.
So the entire search trained under PLAIN cross-entropy. With a 52.5%
majority class the optimum of plain CE is "always predict Neutral", and
that is precisely what all four models found. The panel followed: its
counters only advance on bars the model CALLED Buy or Sell, so a
collapsed model leaves them at zero and the line reads "measuring..."
forever.
This was latent, not new. It has been true for every auto-tuned run, but
it was invisible while the labels were near-balanced - last night's
accidental 1:1 barrier gave 43/40/17, where plain CE has no majority to
collapse into. Widening the stop to 2*ATR (correctly - 1*ATR is too tight
to survive noise) moved Neutral to the majority and exposed it.
The guard's stated fear cannot happen. These priors are measured from the
LABEL distribution, and the tuner only perturbs indicator periods
(MA/RSI/MACD/Ichimoku/AD). The barrier label depends on ATR, SL_Mode and
TP_Mode - none of which the search touches - so every candidate sees
byte-identical labels and identical priors. There is nothing to
contaminate. What the guard actually protected was the .stats write, and
that is gated separately: eval candidates never checkpoint and never
persist.
Also, because this is the THIRD quiet no-op to cost a run in this
codebase (after the fictional oversampling log line and the shadow-blend
skip):
- ApplyLogitAdjustment() now WARNS when it declines to install, instead
of silently clearing. A mechanism that cannot announce it is not
running is indistinguishable from one that is.
- The panel distinguishes "measuring..." (before era 1, nothing scored
yet - an honest warm-up) from "no directional calls yet" (eras trained,
zero calls - a finding, not a wait).
Both builds compile 0 errors / 0 warnings. No retrain forced by this
commit itself, but the collapsed models must be discarded.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three defects found by reading the 2026-08-01 training logs, all of which
only became visible because the relabel made the numbers mean something.
1. A STALE ENUM TRAINED FOUR MODELS ON THE WRONG TARGET.
`OnInit: trade settings snapshot - SL_Mode=1 TP_Mode=-101`
-101 was TP_PREV_SWING, deleted from TAKE_PROFIT_MODE on 2026-07-31 in
7eb48f5. MetaTrader does not validate a saved enum input against the
enum's current members, so charts saved before that kept the old
integer. BarrierMultiples()'s `if(tpMult <= 0.0) tpMult = slMult;`
then quietly turned it into a 1:1 barrier, and all four topologies
trained ~250 eras against a strategy nobody selected - while the log
reported "target 1.00*ATR" as though it were configured.
Since the relabel these two inputs ARE the label definition, so this
is not a bad trade setting, it is a wrong dataset. ValidateBarrier-
Inputs() now refuses to start (INIT_FAILED + Alert + an explicit fix)
on any value that is not an enum member. Members are enumerated rather
than range-checked because both enums are sparse and carry negative
sentinels, so no min/max test can tell a legal value from a deleted
one - which is the entire failure mode. The fallback survives as
belt-and-braces but now announces itself: a fallback that cannot say
it fired is indistinguishable from correct behaviour.
2. THE DEPLOYABILITY FLOOR BECAME MATHEMATICALLY UNREACHABLE.
`tradeableOK` required `dirPrecPct >= baseRatePct`, where baseRatePct
is Buy+Sell as a share of all bars. At the old exact-pivot target that
was ~6%, so "beat the base rate" read as "beat chance" and the test
looked sound. Triple-barrier labels put it at ~83%, so the gate now
demanded 83% directional precision - impossible by construction.
Observed live: all four topologies cycling "PLATEAU stage 3 ... nothing
safe to deploy" at a perfectly healthy 43-45% precision, with no
checkpoint able to ship however good it got.
Replaced with ZERO-SKILL precision, max(Buy,Sell)/allBars: exactly the
score of the degenerate always-call-one-direction model this floor
exists to reject. Correct at any base rate - ~43% on the current
labels, ~3% on the old rare-pivot ones. The era line now prints
"(chance N%, edge +Mpp)" beside the selection score, because 44%
precision is excellent against a 3% chance level and worthless against
a 43% one, and reading the first as the second is what made tonight's
run look better than it was.
3. THE HORIZON IGNORED THE BARRIER GEOMETRY.
ComputeBarrierHorizonBars() returned the median ZigZag leg, which
measures how long a ~1 ATR move takes and says nothing about how long
the CONFIGURED barrier needs. First-passage time out of [-m,+k] scales
with m*k, so a 1:3 barrier takes ~3x as long as 1:1; the unscaled
horizon would have timed out most 1:3 trades and pushed Neutral
straight back up, re-creating the imbalance the relabel removes.
Now multiplied by slMult*tpMult, calibrated against a real measurement
rather than assumed: the accidental 1:1 run resolved at horizon 12 with
only 16.7% timeouts, so the swing median is the right scale at m*k=1.
Verifiable, not just asserted: the prebuild now counts barriers that
ended on the VERTICAL barrier and reports them as a share of Neutral.
Neutral conflates "timed out" with "stopped out" and only the first
indicts the horizon.
Both builds compile 0 errors / 0 warnings. Forces a retrain - correcting
TP_Mode re-keys the fingerprint (|TB:1:-101 -> |TB:1:3), which is right:
no existing model was trained on the intended target.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The 31:1 class imbalance was self-inflicted by the TARGET, not a property
of the market. Labelling only the exact bar where a ZigZag pivot confirms
gave Buy 1164 / Sell 1164 / Neutral 35841, and every correction mechanism
this codebase accumulated sits downstream of that one choice: the
logit-adjusted loss and its range cap, the prior EMA, the +-3.0 output-bias
seed, balanced-accuracy-then-precision selection with its coverage floor,
the recall floor and its catch-22, the alternation gate, NMS, and the four
oversampling designs that collapsed before them.
The reference this engine is built on (references/neuronetworksbook.pdf
ch. 3.1/3.3) also uses ZigZag, but targets the DIRECTION TO THE NEXT
EXTREMUM on every bar - ~50/50 by construction, with no imbalance to
correct at all. It never had this problem because it never asked "is this
the pivot bar".
Labels are now the triple barrier (Lopez de Prado ch. 3), using the EA's
OWN SL_Mode/TP_Mode: does a trade opened at this bar's close reach its
target before its stop, within a horizon. Buy = long resolves, Sell =
short resolves, Neutral = neither. Consequences:
- dir-precision in the era line stops being a proxy and becomes the win
rate of the strategy under its own exit rules.
- Expected balance ~25/25/50 at the shipped 1:3 (gambler's ruin), i.e.
~2:1 instead of 31:1. Measured and logged at the end of the prebuild.
- Spread is charged on both legs, so it is a NET win rate.
- Intrabar ambiguity resolves to the STOP. OHLC cannot order two touches
inside one bar and the optimistic reading is how a backtested edge
becomes a live loss.
ZigZag stays as input features (EnableSwingContext) and now also supplies
the vertical barrier: the horizon is the median confirmed leg length,
snapped to a coarse ladder. Derived, not configured, and deliberately kept
out of the filename fingerprint - a filename keyed on a measured quantity
orphans a trained model the moment the measurement moves.
Removed, because the premise died with the old target:
- the alternation gate. Correct for pivot labels (a ZigZag cannot emit two
same-type pivots in a row, so a repeat was provably a false fire), and
wrong for barrier labels, which answer each bar independently. It also
took its worst consequence with it: a one-sided model previously got ONE
trade per backtest, a hard blocker on marketplace validation.
- SignalClusterWindow now defaults off - it de-duplicated repeats that are
now real trades. Kept as an opt-in display control.
- LABEL_WINDOW_BARS, the pivot-widening pass, ConfirmedZigZagLabel.
- the era-0 output-bias seed now needs a genuinely dominant class (0.70)
rather than 0.40; at ~50% Neutral a +-3.0 seed is a distortion, not a
correction.
Also fixed, both found while wiring the above:
1. RefreshConvergedSignal sized its buffers from a date delta
(Bars(sym, period, dtStudied, TimeCurrent())). dtStudied is a training
watermark; in the tester it is loaded from a live-chart save AHEAD of
the simulated date, so the interval inverted, Bars() returned ~0, and
the buffer came out at exactly m_historyBars - deep enough for the OHLC
window and far too shallow for the Donchian-50 / 20-bar-return / SMA
extension behind it. Inference silently computed DIFFERENT features
from the ones training learned on, live as well as in the tester. Now
sized from what the feature builder actually needs.
2. The barrier horizon is resolved on the deployed path too. A deployed
model never enters Train(), so it never reached the prebuild, and
OnlineLearnStep reads the horizon as its confirmation delay - left at
the fallback it would have backpropped bars whose barriers had not
resolved. Silent lookahead in the one place that writes to a live model.
SL_Mode/TP_Mode join the weights fingerprint: they define the labels now,
so a model trained at 1:3 must never be silently reused at 1:1. This
re-keys every pre-existing model by design - none were trained on this task.
Inference census extended with the vote gate. LongCondition/ShortCondition
open with a readiness check the refresh counters never see; in the tester it
reduces to "the seeded _optcache.nnw must have LOADED", and if it did not,
every vote is hard-zeroed while the model still answers Buy. The old three
counters would have read that as "the model says Neutral" - false, and a
completely different fix. This is the leading candidate for the
zero-direction backtest and the census can now name it in one run.
Both builds compile 0 errors / 0 warnings. Forces a full retrain.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The per-era `dW/W` line measured the change in each layer's weight NORM.
That statistic cannot separate "this layer only shrank under weight decay"
from "this layer moved somewhere useful" - a rotation at constant norm and
pure decay can print the same number.
It matters right now: on SP500 H1 the LSTM layers print a near-constant
~1.05%/era that exactly equals their geometric norm decay over 318 eras
(HYB lstm2 12.966 -> 0.755, monotone, never once up), while a sibling conv
oscillates around a much slower drift. Norm-change can only hint at that.
Now prints norm(d|W|% / |dW|%). Under decay alone the two are equal; any
gradient component adds in quadrature to the second, so a learning layer
shows the second clearly larger. Diagnostic only - no training behaviour
changes, fingerprint untouched.
Also removes two log lines that described machinery deleted in 397b0ea:
the plateau ladder's terminal stage still claimed "after a warm restart
AND full gamma anneal", and the CONVERGED line "across a warm restart and
a full focal-gamma anneal". Both printed on every CONV/LSTM convergence
today. Same failure mode as the oversampling line 397b0ea fixed: a log
that describes what an older version would have done is confirming
evidence for a false hypothesis.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The imbalance section offered nine controls for one job. Audited against the
code, five of them did not do what their names said at the shipped defaults:
AILogitPriorStrength DEAD - Inference.mqh's post-hoc prior early-returns
whenever the adjusted loss is on, which is default.
OversampleParity DEAD in training - Training.mqh gated the replay loop
on !useLogitAdjustedLoss (correctly, citing Buda et
al. 2018). Live only in the online-learning path.
EnableMinorityReplay DEAD as replay. It survived ONLY as a focal-gamma
damper - "replay minority bars through pass-2
oversampling" was a focal-loss switch.
ConstrainReplay DEAD as a cap; it only chose damper 0.125 vs 0.25.
UseStaticPrior An exact duplicate of FreezePriorCalibration - the two
were OR'd together in the single place either is read.
So they were not five mechanisms fighting; they were one mechanism plus eight
knobs that mostly described machinery that no longer ran. That is worse than
a real conflict, because the log agreed with the names: the label-cache line
printed "reps up to 28x (90% parity) (seeding era 0's class-balance
oversampling)" on every run, describing an oversampling pass that had been
switched off. It is fixed here too - it cost this session a wrong diagnosis.
The one genuine redundancy was focal loss, running at gamma*0.125 alongside
the adjusted loss: two corrections on the same axis, the exact stacking
failure this file already cited Buda et al. for in two other places, damped
by a replay flag whose replay path was itself dead. Removed rather than
re-tuned. The plateau ladder is unaffected - its escape is the learning-rate
warm restart; the gamma anneal beside it only ever stepped toward zero.
WHAT REMAINS is logit-adjusted loss (Menon et al. 2021) plus a prior freeze:
LogitAdjustTau 0 = off; replaces the separate EnableLogitAdjusted-
Loss boolean, since a strength dial where 0 already
means off does not need an on/off switch beside it.
FreezePriorCalibration unchanged.
It is the only one of the six corrections with a consistency guarantee, and
it is consistent for exactly the balanced-error metric checkpoint selection
already ranks on - so the loss and the deploy decision optimize one thing.
The online continual-learning path keeps its own alpha-balanced focal weight,
now as constants pinned to the removed inputs' shipped defaults, so its
behaviour is unchanged. It legitimately needs its own correction:
ApplyLogitAdjustment() only runs inside a training run, so a deployed model
that was reloaded carries no logit offsets and would otherwise stream 31:1
data into itself uncorrected.
The weights-filename fingerprint is BYTE-IDENTICAL. The focal slot was a
double fed to a %d conversion and had always emitted a literal 0; the |MR:
segment is written as the constant its shipped defaults produced. Dropping
either would have re-keyed every model and forced a from-scratch retrain of
the one topology currently converged and trading.
Also removed as orphans: FOCAL_GAMMA_PRESET, MAX_OVERSAMPLE_REPLICAS,
OVERSAMPLE_PARITY_FRACTION, PLATEAU_GAMMA_STEP, and the now-unreachable
"neutralized by prior correction" diagnostic.
Both builds compile 0 errors, 0 warnings. No retrain forced.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds "dW/W dense1:0.412(0.31%) conv1:0.088(0.000%) ..." to the era line:
each layer's weight L2 norm and its relative change since the previous era.
Why: a frozen stage and a badly-suited architecture look identical from the
outside. Both give a flat metric and a retreat to the majority class, and
neither the loss, the accuracy nor the per-class recall can tell them apart.
This session cost two full retrain cycles guessing between them - a forget-
gate bias (a real bug, measured, but not the cause of the observed failure)
and a conv receptive field (which turned out to be a regression, not a fix).
A layer sitting at ~0.000% era after era while its neighbours move is
receiving no gradient, and no amount of retraining or hyperparameter work
will change that. A net where every layer moves and the output still
collapses is a genuine architecture or objective problem. The distinction is
one glance at the log instead of a redeploy-and-wait cycle per hypothesis.
Costs one host-side buffer read per layer per era, off the training path.
Both builds compile 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The plateau/regression line printed balancedOosEra as the current value while
comparing against m_bestBalancedOos, which has held the SELECTION score since
a142749. Two different metrics in one sentence, so HYBRID logged "regressed
from best 14.4% to 34.0%" a hundred times - a regression to a higher number,
which is not a thing. The comparison itself was right (selectionScore, coverage
weighted, genuinely below best); only the print was wrong. 1039ad9 relabelled
these strings but missed that this site passes the wrong variable.
The startup config line had the same shape of gap: it printed the dense taper
and called itself self-verifying while the DERIVED conv and recurrent stages -
the ones that dominate CONV/LSTM/HYBRID - were invisible. It now shows the
width into and out of each front-end stage, and flags the case where the dense
stack is wider than the vector reaching it (a linear fan-out cannot recover
what the bottleneck discarded; it only adds parameters). Flagged, not silently
reshaped - that would re-key trained topologies mid-comparison.
UsesConvStage()/UsesLstmStage() replace HasConvBeforeLstm() as the primitive,
so each subclass declares its composition once and both the capacity budget and
the config line derive from it rather than restating it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two things the 2026-07-30 run exposed.
1. Every user-facing message still called the selection metric "balanced
accuracy". It has ranked on directional precision since a142749, so
"CONVERGED ... balanced accuracy 32.5%" was reporting a 32.5%
PRECISION as if it were macro-recall, while the same era logged an
actual balanced accuracy of 49%. Two different numbers under one
name, in the line that announces a deploy. Relabelled at every site,
including the stage-3 refusal, which still described the per-class
recall floor that stopped being the gate.
2. Precision is now bucketed by confidence tier and logged per era,
both per-tier and cumulatively from each tier upward:
| tier prec T0:19%(410)[>=28%/1204] T1:31%(520)[>=34%/794] ...
The per-tier number says whether confidence is calibrated to
correctness at all; if it does not rise T0->T3, raising the floor
buys nothing and that is the finding. The ">=" number is what a floor
would actually deliver, with its fire count, so the coverage cost is
visible in the same line. Tier weights are 25/50/75/100, so for an
AI-only config Min_Vote_Open maps straight across: 50 = ">=T1",
75 = ">=T2", 100 = ">=T3".
Bucketing happens at the existing live-fired accounting site, so it
measures exactly the population that trades - not the raw argmax.
Both builds compile 0 errors, 0 warnings. No retrain needed for either.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The 2026-07-30 run caught a bug in the precision-led selection metric
within 8 eras. HYBRID made exactly ONE directional call in era 7, got it
right, scored 100% precision, and locked that in as best-ever. Nothing
can beat 100%, so the checkpoint froze on a single sample and the run
could only burn to the era cap deploying it.
The coverage floor already existed and already blocked that era from
being DEPLOYABLE - but the ranking ignored coverage entirely whenever no
era had qualified yet, which is precisely the phase where the ranking is
the only thing steering the run.
Precision is now discounted by coverage/floor, capped at 1.0. Continuous
rather than a threshold: an era at half the floor scores half its
precision, so coverage and precision both improve rank and neither can
be traded away. Above the floor the credit saturates, so ranking among
genuinely deployable eras is unchanged pure precision.
Also: the startup config line printed "tau 1.00" while every chart was
actually running the capped 0.35 - the effective value depends on the
measured class priors and is not knowable at init. Now reads
"1.00 requested"; ApplyLogitAdjustment still logs the real figure.
Both builds compile 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Completes the derived-topology work. Three inputs removed.
AIType loses its depth suffix - AI_MLP/AI_CONV/AI_LSTM/AI_HYBRID, five
entries instead of eight. Depth is now derived from the two endpoints
the taper already has to connect (derived first-layer width, output-tied
final width) at a 2x per-layer compression target, clamped [2..5].
Asking a user to pick a layer count while the code derives the widths
those layers taper between was asking for half a decision: at 64 units
tapering to 12, four layers compress by 1.4x per step and five by 1.3x,
so the extra depth bought no abstraction. On the shipping H1/10y default
the derivation lands on 3 layers - the depth that actually won Run 2.
StudyPeriods removed. There is no case for training on less data than
the broker provides at a ~6% directional base rate; the honest
generalization read comes from the OOS holdout, not from withholding
history. Training now starts at the earliest available bar, floored by
MinTrainYear, which answers a different question (excluding dubious
pre-history) and stays.
That required closing the hazard the old code documented: the capacity
budget now MEASURES the symbol's real bar count, and a topology derived
from a measurement would widen as history downloads. Both ends are now
pinned. Every derived value left the weights-filename fingerprint -
keying a filename on a measured quantity means the EA looks for a file
that does not exist, starts from era 0 and orphans a trained model,
silently, because a missing cache is the normal first-run state. The
shape lives in the .cfg instead, where LoadAndCompare now ADOPTS the
four derived fields rather than diffing them; a mismatch there would
discard a fully-trained model over nothing the user did. Two fields
appended to the .cfg for the conv/LSTM stages, length-guarded on read
because FileReadInteger past EOF returns 0 with no error.
ForceHiddenLayers, a compile-time constant like DebuggingMode, pins
depth for diagnostic comparisons. It joins the fingerprint only when
non-zero, so forced depths get their own files - sequential comparisons
only, not simultaneous from one .ex5.
Derived shape, H1/10y defaults (21 features x 20 bars): first layer 64,
3 dense, 8 conv filters, 16 LSTM units. The LSTM block halves from
~58k to ~28k weights.
Both builds compile 0 errors, 0 warnings. Re-keys existing models.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three separate reports from one deploy.
1. CONV, LSTM and HYBRID all came back tagged [4109]. The weights
fingerprint omits the topology type on purpose - the file path already
separates it (State\CONV\ vs State\LSTM\ vs State\HYB\) and hashing a
value that is constant within a folder buys nothing while re-keying
every trained model into a forced retrain. So the files were never at
risk, but the tag could not do its one job. Prefixing the short id
makes it unique on the display side only; the hex half still greps
straight to the .nnw inside the folder the prefix names.
2. The default panel read like a training console. Six lines down to
three, each answering a question an owner actually has. The deploy
internals (best score, eras-since-best, ladder stage) were developer
diagnostics describing a recall floor that no longer decides anything,
and were already in the era-end journal line. In-sample accuracy left
the panel too: it grades the model on bars it trained on, so it always
flatters, and showing it beside the honest number invites reading the
wrong one. New compile-time DebuggingMode constant - deliberately not
an input - carries the IS/OOS pair and the resolved model path into
the journal instead. No extra Inputs row, no extra Market description
line, no user-reachable firehose.
3. Panel drag and buttons stuttered under training load, exactly as the
2026-07-26 note raising the chunk budget to 200ms warned they might.
Backed off to the documented 120ms - worst-case click latency is that
budget - and the derived topology (~292k weights to ~29k) makes the
throughput this costs far cheaper than when that note was written.
Also halved the panel redraw rate to 2.5 Hz: ChartRedraw repaints the
whole chart, so its cost scales with accumulated arrows, and 5 Hz was
the larger half of the stutter. Era-end still force-refreshes.
Both builds compile 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Balanced accuracy is maximized by exactly the model this system must never
deploy. Measured frontier at fixed signal strength, base rate 6.1%:
tau 0.00 -> calls 0.2% of bars at 27.3% precision, balanced 34.0%
tau 0.35 -> calls 2.0% of bars at 15.5% precision, balanced 36.3%
tau 1.00 -> calls 49.6% of bars at 6.4% precision, balanced 53.5%
It rises monotonically as the model calls MORE and is right LESS, because
two of its three terms are directional recalls that a call-everything model
drives to ~95%, while the Neutral term it sacrifices counts for only a
third. The 2026-07-29 run landed exactly there: balanced 58-64% while
calling a direction on ~100% of bars at a 5-7% win rate against a ~6% base
rate. Only the per-class recall floor stopped those deploying - a guard
doing the job the objective should have been doing - and that same guard
also rejected the genuinely useful sparse-but-precise checkpoints.
Ranking is now DIRECTIONAL PRECISION: of the bars called Buy or Sell, how
many were right. That is what a trading edge is. Two anti-degenerate floors
bracket it, since precision alone is trivially maximized by calling almost
nothing: coverage must reach a fraction of the true directional base rate
(derived, not configured - it adapts to any symbol/timeframe/label rule),
and precision must at least beat that base rate.
Against the same frontier the deploy order inverts from
tau 1.00 > 0.50 > 0.35 > 0.15 (old, worst model first)
to
tau 0.35 > 0.50 > 1.00 (new; 0.00/0.15 rejected on coverage)
Balanced accuracy is kept in the log as a diagnostic and marked as such, so
a run where the two disagree - the signature of an over-caller - is visible
at a glance. MinRecall no longer decides what ships; it now only drives the
diagnostic recall line and is a candidate for removal.
Both builds compile 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Menon et al. 2021 (ICLR), "Long-tail learning via logit adjustment": add
tau*log(prior_c) to each class logit inside the training gradient. Softmax
CE on adjusted logits is consistent for BALANCED error - the metric
checkpoint selection already ranks on - so the loss and the deploy decision
finally optimize the same thing.
The engine already computed a true softmax + categorical-CE gradient and
wrote it over the per-neuron sigmoid delta, so this is an offset added to
three logits in the two places that gradient is built (backProp scalar path
and backPropOCL). No backend, kernel or DLL change; the forward pass and
every inference path are untouched, which is the point - the network learns
to absorb the offset, so its raw argmax becomes the balanced-optimal
decision with nothing applied at inference.
Replaces rather than stacks. Minority replay is disabled while this is on,
and the post-hoc inference prior is forced off. Stacking is not a
theoretical worry: simulated on the measured 1118/1119/34298 distribution
in the weak-signal regime, plain CE collapses to Neutral (33.4% balanced,
Buy 0%), replay reaches 48.1%, logit adjustment 50.9% with better balance -
and BOTH together score 45.4% with Neutral recall at 0%, worse than either
alone. Buda et al. 2018 predicts exactly that.
Motivation from the six-chart run: every topology took one direction to
~50% recall and abandoned the other, the direction chosen arbitrarily (the
batch-norm control went Buy 1% / Sell 42%, the inverse of the other five).
One era in 1,301 cleared the per-class recall floor.
Fingerprinted conditionally, so the converged 60.7% models on disk keep
their filenames and stay loadable as the fallback.
Both builds compile 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Evidence (MQL5\Logs, SP500 H1, 2026-07-29):
Perceptron era 61 Buy 32% Sell 27% Neut 94% bal 51%
LSTM era 160 Buy 16% Sell 11% Neut 98% bal 42% (peaked 49% @ era 44)
Hybrid era 179 Buy 5% Sell 2% Neut 99% bal 35% (peaked 41%)
CONV era 228 Buy 2% Sell 4% Neut 99% bal 35% (peaked 40% @ era 122)
Every model peaks early then decays monotonically toward Neutral, and nothing
stops it: the restore-best-weights + decay-eta handler is gated on
m_bestPassedRecall, which stays false forever when no checkpoint ever clears the
per-class floor. CONV ran 228 eras with eta pinned at its 0.000300 start. The
plateau ladder cannot end such a run either (stage 3 refuses to deploy without a
recall pass, so it resets ~27 times), making it a 1000-era one-way trip.
The gate's own justification had expired. It was written when the pre-pass
tiebreak was blended-accuracy-only, where "best" really did mean "called Neutral
most confidently". The balanced-selection change replaced that with
`balancedOosEra > m_bestBalancedOos` plus an isFullyCollapsedEra exclusion, so a
Neutral-only era now scores ~33% - the FLOOR of the balanced metric - and cannot
anchor the checkpoint at all. Pre-pass "best" now means "most class-balanced so
far", which is worth defending; and isWorseEra is itself a balanced-accuracy
regression, so it cannot fire merely for trading Neutral calls for Buy/Sell.
The original concern still holds while the best-so-far IS near-collapse, so the
escape is margin-guarded: defend the checkpoint only once balanced accuracy sits
more than BALANCED_WORTH_DEFENDING_MARGIN_PCT (5pp) above the one-class floor of
100/3. Against the run above that engages for all three stuck topologies
(42.3/41.3/50.0 vs a 38.3 threshold) while a genuinely collapsed run still
explores freely.
Two inputs restored to the regime that actually produced a deploy:
- MinRecall 60 -> 40. The one successful auto-deploy in the logs (Hybrid, 28th
00:50, best balanced 66.0%) ran against a 40% floor. 60 has never been shown
reachable here - a floor above what the config can reach is the same "target
set too high" failure the surrounding comment already warns about.
- OversampleParity 60 -> 90. 60 overcorrected. Runs now START Neutral-dominant
(Buy 0-11% recall at era 1) and call Buy/Sell on 0-4% of bars against a ~6%
true base rate - under-calling, with no headroom to converge down from. The
deploying run began at Buy 90% / Sell 36%, 24% of bars called, and settled into
the floor from above. Raw over-calling is the intended starting condition; live
calls are base-rate-calibrated by AILogitPriorStrength, which is why the input's
own note says to judge over-calling by live-fired precision, not raw counts.
Compiles 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ExpertSignalAIBase.mqh was 8216 lines: the class declaration followed by 87
method bodies covering training, labelling, feature extraction, persistence,
chart drawing, online learning, the GA auto-tuner and inference, all in one
file. Train() alone is 1492 lines; a change to arrow drawing meant scrolling
past the era loop.
Moved the bodies into Expert\AIBase\, included at the bottom of the original
after the class declaration:
Training.mqh 1607 era loop, plateau ladder, checkpoint select, deploy
Features.mqh 1093 indicator creation + per-bar input feature vector
ChartUI.mqh 634 arrows, arrow persistence, status panel, cleanup
Persistence.mqh 492 .stats/.cfg sidecars, CPU-inference validation, copy
OnlineLearning.mqh 461 live continual learning, EMA shadow, OOS simulator
Labels.mqh 309 ZigZag pivot labels, async label-cache prebuild
AutoTune.mqh 275 genetic tuner (population, crossover, halving)
Inference.mqh 235 softmax, prior calibration, class priors
ExpertSignalAIBase.mqh 8216 -> 3131 (declaration + topology build only)
This is a pure relocation - verified mechanically, not by eye: HEAD's file
reconstructed from the eight partials plus the surviving remainder is
byte-identical to HEAD, span for span (scratchpad verify_split.py). No
declaration moved, no signature changed, no code rewritten, so behaviour is
unchanged by construction.
Compiles 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
AnimateDread