Three signal-killing issues fixed:
1. Rank normalization DISABLED — was double-normalizing with PopArt,
destroying magnitude difference between micro-rewards (±0.1) and
trade exits (±5.0). PopArt alone preserves relative magnitude.
2. n_steps 5→1 (TD(0)) — dense micro-rewards alternate ±0.1 each bar.
With n=5, they cancel out over 5 bars. TD(0) preserves the per-bar
signal that the temporal pipeline needs to learn from.
3. per_alpha 0.6→0.3 — lower = more uniform PER sampling. Dense micro-
rewards have tiny TD-errors (easy to predict), so high alpha ignores
them. Lower alpha ensures micro-reward experiences get sampled.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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