For reviewers

What we are asking you to check — and a one-click way to tell us.

Thank you for looking at ApprenticeOps. This page is the short version; the full guide is REVIEWER.md. If you read nothing else, read the claim, what to check, and how to give feedback.

The claim, in one breath

A reproducible benchmark and CPU-telemetry method that profiles small open-weight local LLM deployments — with the doctoral track targeting models up to 5B parameters — as homelab/edge ops assistants on quality × safety × energy together, and reduces model choice to a measured Pareto front that the usual proxies (parameter count, benchmark score, a “reasoning” badge, perplexity) get wrong. The contribution is the integration, not any single axis. The safety result is framed as corroboration of the agent-/SLM-safety literature, not discovery — please hold us to not overclaiming there.

This is an empirical benchmark paper in preparation, aimed at a datasets and benchmarks venue. Your review is pre-submission peer feedback.

What we are asking you to check

We map onto the NeurIPS dimensions so your assessment ports to the venue.

Dimension The specific thing to scrutinise here
Quality / soundness Are the deterministic checks genuinely judge-free? Do the bootstrap CIs support the bracket claims? Is the quality axis (the 5-rep × 2-judge ensemble, κ_quad ≈ 0.91) honest about residual judge↔︎human uncertainty?
Clarity Is the sovereign constraint unambiguous (offline = no external model API, not information-poverty)? Are the Pareto/dominance definitions precise?
Significance Is the offline/CPU/commodity + energy-coupled-selection regime useful to practitioners and researchers? Is the harness reusable?
Originality Is the integration genuinely unoccupied by prior work, and is the safety axis honestly scoped as replication? (NeurIPS explicitly values originality-by-integration.)
Reproducibility Can you regenerate a headline number from a clean checkout? Is anything node-bound disclosed as such?
Limitations / ethics Are n=1, judge egress, Linux-only telemetry, and the thin safety arm stated up front?

The most useful review names the single result or change that would raise your score. “The safety arm is n=60 on two models — deepen it or soften the claim” is gold; “needs more experiments” is hard to act on.

Where we most want pushback

  1. Is the contribution differentiated enough from existing AIOps / agent-safety benchmarks?
  2. Is any claim over-scoped versus the evidence (especially the n=60 safety arm)?
  3. Which single result would you require to consider this publishable at the D&B track?
  4. Is the honesty framing (safety = corroboration, not discovery) convincing, or does it under/oversell?
  5. Is the energy axis a real contribution or a nice-to-have?

How to give feedback (one click)

→ Open the structured feedback form

It mirrors the dimensions above — pick an area, describe the finding, and (most useful of all) tell us the one change that would raise your score. Even one filled box helps. Prefer freeform? A plain GitHub issue or a PR is equally welcome. New scenarios, models, and hardware re-runs attack the n=1 limitation most directly.

You may use your own AI tools to help you read and re-derive numbers — the repo is public. A human should write and stand behind the review; disclose substantial AI assistance if your venue asks (the same standard we hold ourselves to).

A note on trust

Before release, every quantitative claim was re-derived from the committed snapshot (data/snapshots/) by an independent clean-room audit, and every reference was resolved against arXiv / CrossRef. That audit corrected one over-stated safety superlative and surfaced an undisclosed served-failure (both fixed). The figures on this site are generated from the same committed exports, so you can regenerate every number and every graph yourself — see REPRODUCE.md.