v3.10.26

## What ships

Took the user's "release hype → benchmark infrastructure" feedback to the wire. This release IS the infrastructure, not the rank.

## Honest two-dataset picture

| Dataset | nDCG@10 | 95% CI | Rank | vs BM25 |
|---|---:|---|---:|---|
| **NFCorpus** | 0.352 | [0.317, 0.387] | 2/11 | +0.027 (n.s.) |
| **SciFact** | 0.626 | [0.577, 0.672] | 10/11 | **-0.053 (p<0.05) — significant LOSS** |

The user's acceptance test ("ruflo beats BM25 on both") **fails on SciFact** — we significantly lose to BM25 by 0.053. On NFCorpus, only SBERT msmarco and ColBERT are statistically significant wins; the gaps to SPLADE++/GTR-XL/BM25 are within CI overlap.

**Two-dataset mean**: ours 0.489, BM25 0.502, SPLADE++ 0.526, BGE-large 0.551. **Below BM25 on the mean.** BGE-base zero-shot is competent on NFCorpus (medical IR), weak on SciFact (fact-verification favours lexical retrieval). The NFCorpus rank-2 is real but not representative.

## What's in the box

- `docs/benchmarks/BEIR-MATRIX.md` — dataset × pipeline × metric grid with bootstrap CIs and pipeline disclosure
- `scripts/beir-bootstrap-significance.mjs` — paired bootstrap, 10K resamples, mulberry32 seed=42
- `perQuery` metrics now saved in every BEIR run JSON (external bootstrap verification by anyone)
- ADR-085 hedged appropriately ("TOP-2 on BEIR NFCorpus, not BEIR average", "direct dense, no fine-tune, no rerank")
- ADR-086 documents the silent-fallback bug story + bootstrap method + honest two-dataset picture
- 2 ruvector upstream issues filed: [#523](https://github.com/ruvnet/ruvector/issues/523) (API contract bugs), [#524](https://github.com/ruvnet/ruvector/issues/524) (bundle BGE-base/small)

## Reproduce

```bash
git clone https://github.com/ruvnet/ruflo && cd ruflo
npm install && ( cd v3/@claude-flow/cli && npx tsc )

# NFCorpus + SciFact (~30 min ingest each)
mkdir -p /tmp/beir-nfcorpus && cd /tmp/beir-nfcorpus
curl -sL -o nf.zip 'https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/nfcorpus.zip' && unzip -q nf.zip
node /path/to/ruflo/v3/@claude-flow/cli/scripts/run-beir-bge.mjs

mkdir -p /tmp/beir-scifact && cd /tmp/beir-scifact
curl -sL -o sf.zip 'https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/thakur/BEIR/datasets/scifact.zip' && unzip -q sf.zip
BEIR_DATA_DIR=/tmp/beir-scifact/scifact node /path/to/ruflo/v3/@claude-flow/cli/scripts/run-beir-bge.mjs

# Bootstrap significance (10k resamples, ~1s)
node /path/to/scripts/beir-bootstrap-significance.mjs /path/to/run.json
```

## Honest limits

- Two datasets only. BEIR ships 18. The 2-dataset mean is suggestive, not definitive.
- Zero-shot. NFCorpus has a 110K-pair train split that would close ~0.02-0.05 nDCG.
- Single annotator on internal labels (separate from BEIR's external qrels).
- Tailscale-via-ruvultra GPU compute discussed for larger datasets (TREC-COVID, HotpotQA, NQ) — tracked.

## Install

```bash
npx ruflo@3.10.26    # latest / alpha / v3alpha all aligned
```

Full ADR: [v3/docs/adr/ADR-086-silent-fallback-and-bootstrap.md](v3/docs/adr/ADR-086-silent-fallback-and-bootstrap.md)