diff --git a/TODO.sota/64-b3-arabic-sota.md b/TODO.sota/64-b3-arabic-sota.md
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@@ -1,5 +1,15 @@
 # WO64 — B3: Arabic to external SOTA (DER < 2.0, WikiNews < 8)
 
+**Stage-2 verdict (2026-10-22, INTERIM — oepoch-0 control pending):**
+the r8 noisy-student continuation finished all 36,321 steps (loss
+0.001-0.003) but scores **DER-CE 7.13** on the SadeedDiac-25 protocol
+(1,200 paragraphs, interscript-ml-tools scoring) — worse than the v1
+lineage (teacher 2.29, rung-2.0 4.82, rung-2.1 4.57) and far off the
+< 2.0 target. Suspected cause: the continuation overfit the
+oracle-relabeled targets (suspiciously low train loss + eval
+regression). oepoch-0 (end of continuation-epoch 1) eval queued as the
+control; the r8 student line ships NOTHING at this number.
+
 Status: IN_PROGRESS (r8 stage 2 training 2026-10-22, stage-3 SadeedDiac eval auto-chained; VRR closure = WO81)
 Goal: SadeedDiac DER < 2.0 (canonical 2.29), WikiNews multiref WER < 8
 (news specialist 8.85). VRR reported.