Contract-Governed Multi-Agent Graph Orchestration for Long-Horizon Autonomous Research Pipelines

Contribution-and-evidence summary: the manuscript aligns with the proof-first user intent and presents a coherent theorem chain (committed-prefix soundness, bounded recovery/non-oscillation, and conditional FAR contraction with provenance invariance), each tied to executed symbolic/runtime audits, claim-matched figures/tables, and appendix counterexample bundles. Substantive strengths: formal statements are assumption-scoped, equations are referenced and linked to method/evidence artifacts, bibliography and citation integrity are sound, and layout/caption quality is publication-ready. Substantive weaknesses: no blocker-level scientific weakness remains; residual concerns are cross-artifact trace/schema parity rather than claim correctness. Real open questions: scope expansion for HM-TH-03 beyond covered attack classes and robustness of guarantees under richer asynchronous scheduling assumptions. High-leverage improvement directions: synchronize canonical research-trace claim links and proof-first metadata fields, then extend adversarial coverage to test conditionality boundaries. Minor polish: optional readability refinements for dense figure legends at print scale and one-pass metadata consistency tightening.

- Proof-first modality fit is strong: formal definitions, assumptions, lemmas, theorems, and proof sketches are central rather than peripheral. - Claim-evidence closure is explicit in manuscript artifacts: each core claim is tied to theorem-audit outputs, tables/figures, and appendix boundary diagnostics. - Formal context is adequately documented for core claims via notation/theorem structure and scoped validity/non-applicability caveats. - Bibliography hygiene and provenance are sound: conference bibliography style is present, citation keys resolve, and BibTeX entries include DOI/URL fields. - Manuscript packaging quality is acceptable: no code listings, vector figure assets, captioned tables/figures, and main-body length exceeds minimum page budget.

- RF-WARN-01 | affected_claim: cross-claim evidence traceability | missing_or_contradictory_evidence: phase_outputs/research_trace.json currently has empty claim_evidence_links while phase_outputs/validation_simulation.json has per-claim links | owning_phase: revision | acceptance_condition: research_trace mirrors HM-TH-01/02/03 links with evidence_refs and metric_alignment. - RF-WARN-02 | affected_claim: proof-first payload consistency | missing_or_contradictory_evidence: methodology_emphasis metadata is absent in canonical payloads despite proof-first execution | owning_phase: derive_math_methodology + validation_simulation | acceptance_condition: both payloads expose methodology_emphasis="math_optimality" with unchanged scientific claims.

- How far can HM-TH-03 be generalized from covered attack classes to broader protocol exploit families without unacceptable FRR inflation? - Do asynchronous scheduling and heterogeneous tool-latency effects require additional assumptions for the bounded-recovery theorem to remain practically tight?

- Promote canonical trace completeness by mirroring per-claim evidence links from validation outputs into phase_outputs/research_trace.json. - Standardize proof-first metadata (methodology_emphasis="math_optimality") across derive_math_methodology and validation_simulation payloads to reduce downstream schema drift. - Add a focused follow-up attack-family expansion for HM-TH-03 while preserving theorem-regime versus stress-regime reporting.