Deployment profile

FlowEdge checkpoints may carry a flowedge.deployment_profile value in the .safetensors __metadata__ map. The value is a compact JSON object describing the model-to-runtime contract. Profile parsing is setup-time work; the runtime does not allocate while sampling.

Version 1 uses this shape:

{
  "profile_version": 1,
  "model_compatibility_version": 1,
  "observation_schema_hash": "sha256:0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef",
  "action_dim": 8,
  "action_horizon": 16,
  "action_units": "normalized",
  "normalization_type": "minmax",
  "normalization_parameters": {
    "min": [-1.0, -1.0, -1.0, -1.0, -1.0, -1.0, -1.0, -1.0],
    "max": [1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0]
  },
  "solver_default": "euler",
  "solver_min_steps": 6,
  "solver_max_steps": 16
}

The profile version and model compatibility version are independent. FlowEdge currently accepts only version 1 for each. action_dim is in the range 1..65536, action_horizon is 1..4096, and solver limits are in 1..4096 with the minimum no greater than the maximum.

observation_schema_hash is an exact sha256: prefix followed by 64 hexadecimal digits. action_units is normalized or physical; normalization_type is none or minmax. A minmax profile must provide finite, equal-length min and max arrays with one strictly increasing pair per action dimension. A none profile must provide empty normalization parameters.

Profiles are descriptive metadata. FlowEdge validates the contract but does not execute observation preprocessing. Checkpoints without a profile remain valid through the legacy compatibility path until a future profile version makes metadata mandatory.

The C++ contract is implemented in src/core/protocol/deployment_profile.h; conversion and runtime exposure are tracked separately in the deployment-profile issues.