# llm_merge_seeds_smol — the Fisher–Muller replication on a second base lineage (SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct)

**Claim tested (manuscript revision 2026-09-12).** Every language-model result in the paper used one
model lineage (Qwen2.5). Does "merged specialists exceed every parent" hold on an unrelated base?
Base: `HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct` (Apache-2.0, Llama architecture, different lab and
pretraining corpus). Identical protocol to `llm_merge_seeds` (three disjoint families, 600 training
tasks, 3 epochs, rank-16 LoRA, fixed 100-task test sets, soup and TIES merges, 5 training seeds);
`adapters_dir: models/llm_smol` keeps the specialist cache apart from Qwen's. Ran on one L40S in
12 min (`hpc/llm_smol.pbs`). Numbers from `figures/stats_llm_smol.py`; figure `llm_smol.png` (both
lineages side by side).

### Result — replicates, 5/5 seeds, with the same magnitudes
| contrast (SmolLM2) | overall | worst family |
|---|---|---|
| soup − best specialist | +0.049 ± 0.022 (5/5 seeds) | +0.190 ± 0.045 (5/5) |
| TIES − best specialist | +0.097 ± 0.020 (5/5) | +0.202 ± 0.077 (5/5) |
| *(Qwen2.5-0.5B, for reference)* soup − best | +0.040 ± 0.035 (4/5) | +0.200 ± 0.020 (5/5) |
| *(Qwen)* TIES − best | +0.055 ± 0.020 (5/5) | +0.204 ± 0.016 (5/5) |

Absolute levels: best specialist 0.610 ± 0.013 overall / 0.128 worst-family; soup 0.659 / 0.318;
TIES 0.707 / 0.330. Falsifier (not triggered): merged ≤ best specialist in a majority of seeds.