Research-0114: Model overview tiny-AI documentation closeout¶

• Status: Active
• Workstream: docs-only closeout for shipped tiny-AI model docs
• Last updated: 2026-05-14

Question¶

Do the human-facing model overview and FAQ still claim that tiny-AI model weights are future work after model/tiny/registry.json already ships production and smoke ONNX artefacts?

Sources¶

• docs/models/overview.md — stale "Tiny-AI models (planned)" section.
• docs/reference/faq.md — stale FAQ answer saying no first-milestone weights ship yet.
• model/tiny/registry.json — current source of truth for shipped tiny-AI ONNX entries, their kind, and their smoke production/CI role.
• docs/ai/overview.md, docs/ai/inference.md, and docs/ai/model-registry.md — canonical tiny-AI operator docs.

Findings¶

The stale text was contradicted by the registry. Current master ships production entries for VMAF-tiny regressors, codec-aware FR regressors, LPIPS-SqueezeNet, saliency students, TransNet V2, and learned filters, plus explicit smoke-only rows for CI and compatibility. The public model overview should point readers at those families without turning into a second registry, and the FAQ should show a real invocation using a shipped model ID rather than a future vmaf_tiny_vN placeholder.

Alternatives explored¶

Duplicating every registry row into docs/models/overview.md was rejected: it would drift again as soon as a model is added or promoted. The chosen shape keeps a family-level table in the overview and directs operators to model/tiny/registry.json plus per-model cards for authoritative details.

Adding a new ADR was rejected because this PR does not introduce a new model policy or runtime surface; it corrects stale public prose for artefacts that are already shipped and documented elsewhere.

Open questions¶

• None for this closeout.

Related¶

• Docs: docs/models/overview.md, docs/reference/faq.md, docs/ai/model-registry.md