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+# SkillOpt-Sleep — controllable dreaming architecture
+
+The sleep engine is no longer a single fixed pipeline. It is a controllable
+offline "dream / imagination" loop the user steers. This documents the knobs
+added in the four-stage refactor and how they map to the user's design.
+
+## The mental model
+
+> Sleep = an offline "脑补推演" (imagination rollout). Re-run the user's real
+> tasks (and dream-augmented variants) many times, look at what went well vs
+> badly, distil durable rules, and keep only what survives a real-task check —
+> unless the user opts out of that check.
+
+## 1. Data splits — train (dream) / val (real) / test (real)
+
+The anti-overfitting foundation:
+
+| Split | Source | Role |
+|---|---|---|
+| **train** | real tasks **+ dream-augmented** variants | drives reflection (the imagination pool — over-dreaming is fine) |
+| **val** | **real only**, disjoint from test | gates updates (prevents overfitting) |
+| **test** | **real only**, disjoint from val | the final held-out measure, kept close to real usage |
+
+Hard guarantee (unit-tested): a task with `origin='dream'` **never** lands in
+val or test. `assign_splits(val_fraction, test_fraction)` does the deterministic
+3-way split; gbrain's own held-out maps to our `test`.
+
+## 2. The validation gate is optional
+
+`--gate on` (default): an edit is accepted only if it strictly improves the
+**val** score — the SkillOpt discipline that blocks regressions and reward
+hacking.
+
+`--gate off`: greedy. Edits are kept without the hard val-improvement
+requirement (the user decides they don't want hard filtering), but val/test
+movement is still reported (`greedy_improved` / `greedy_regressed` /
+`greedy_flat`) so nothing is hidden.
+
+## 3. Slow-update — long-term memory, gate-independent
+
+Even with the gate off, the engine runs a **slow-update** at the end of the
+nights: it compares behaviour under the first-night vs final skill across the
+val tasks and distils durable longitudinal guidance into a **protected field**
+(`<!-- SLOW_UPDATE_START --> … <!-- SLOW_UPDATE_END -->`, the same markers as
+the main SkillOpt repo). Step-level edits never touch this field. This is the
+"short-term experience → long-term memory" consolidation; turning the gate off
+does not cost you long-term memory.
+
+## 4. Budget — the user picks the spend
+
+`--budget-tokens N` / `--budget-minutes M`: the engine auto-plans depth
+(`nights × rollouts_per_task`) to fit the budget (`plan_depth`). Stops cleanly
+when exhausted and logs what it skipped — no silent truncation. The whole thing
+is offline imagination on the user's own quota.
+
+## 5. Multi-rollout contrastive reflection — the imagination core
+
+`--rollouts-k K` (K>1): each train task is rolled out K times. The optimizer is
+shown the **high-scoring vs low-scoring** attempts of the same task and asked
+what the good ones did that the bad ones didn't, distilling a general rule. This
+is a far stronger signal than a single failure, and it is exactly the user's
+"run it many times, learn from the contrast" idea. Tasks with the highest score
+*spread* (some passed, some failed) are the most informative and are prioritised.
+
+## 6. Multi-objective reward — accuracy ↑, tokens ↓, latency ↓
+
+Every rollout records its `tokens` and `latency_ms`.
+`multi_objective_reward(w_acc, w_tokens, w_latency)` is a weighted reward so a
+skill can be optimised to be **cheaper and faster**, not only more accurate
+(cost terms normalised against a reference; default weights = accuracy-only, so
+existing behaviour is unchanged). This turns "越用越好用" into "越用越准、越省、越快".
+
+## 7. User preferences as a prior
+
+`--preferences "<free text>"`: injected into the optimizer's reflect prompt as a
+prior (set on the optimizer model for dual backends), so the user's stated
+preferences steer what rules get written.
+
+## How the knobs compose (one command)
+
+```bash
+python -m skillopt.sleep.experiments.run_gbrain \
+  --optimizer-backend claude --optimizer-model sonnet \   # strong optimizer
+  --target-backend claude --target-model haiku \          # cheap target (transfer)
+  --seeds thorough-analyst \
+  --gate on \                                              # or off for greedy
+  --rollouts-k 2 \                                         # contrastive imagination
+  --budget-tokens 60000 \                                  # auto-plan depth
+  --preferences "Prefer concise, British English." \       # prior
+  --nights 3
+```
+
+All of this is exercised by the deterministic test suite (29 tests) and
+validated on real Claude + Codex (see `real_api_results.md` / `FINAL_REPORT.md`).