This is the post-v0.2.1 research and engineering backlog. Completed release, publication, protocol-teacher and two-seed benchmark work lives in PROJECT_STATE.md and CHANGELOG.md, not in this active list.

• Select future protocol-teacher candidates on the eval split and reserve test for downstream reporting.
• Evaluate on a less saturated task family with at least three prespecified seeds; retain SFT, raw-teacher and protocol-aligned controls.
• Run JSON-navigation and SQLite real-model comparisons with the same matched-budget and immutable-artifact discipline.
• Repeat the measured GPU recipes on Linux; do not treat the expected throughput improvement as measured until those artifacts exist.

• Cross-tokenizer distillation with an explicit alignment contract.
• Batched or engine-backed rollout decoding; v0.4 batches update forwards, while rollout generation remains deliberately sequential.
• Additional tested model families beyond Qwen2/Qwen3.
• Entropy-aware divergence mixing after a prespecified experiment; current code records teacher entropy but does not implement the method.
• A maintained GPU CI runner. GPU tests remain opt-in until real CUDA infrastructure is configured.

Multi-GPU training, Ray, FSDP, DeepSpeed, vLLM and PPO/GRPO remain intentionally out of scope; use verl or another distributed training system for those needs.