A flag withholds the record and nothing else: the row stays listed, in rank order.
Rules §10 is how a flag is lifted or upheld.
energy-variance-inconsistent — Holographic Quantum Transformer (HQT), -0.5001(1)
Finding. Claims E/N = -0.5001, below RBM+PP's -0.4989635, while reporting a variance that gives a V-score of 5.6e-3 against RBM+PP's 9.81e-4 - 5.7x worse. Taken at face value a state further from an eigenstate should not be lower in energy: by the V-score calibration (rel. err ~ V/63) this energy would sit ~1.2e-3 ABOVE where it is reported. That is grounds for objection, not proof of error. The inference assumes the lower-variance competitor sits near the ground state; a state pinned near a competing, excited configuration can have a small variance and a large energy error (RULES.md 9, the HFDS stripe case). Nothing suggests RBM+PP is such a state here, but the variance alone cannot rule it out.
Diagnosis. The reported energy is inconsistent with the paper's OWN reported variance. At 8x8 the claimed E/N = -0.5001 beats RBM+PP's -0.4989635 while the reported variance (sigma^2 = 1.4e-3 per site, S.S units) gives a V-score of 5.6e-3 against RBM+PP's 9.81e-4 - 5.7x worse. Energy and variance move together - a state further from an eigenstate cannot be lower in energy - so by the V-score calibration this energy should be ~1.2e-3 higher than claimed.
Ruled out. NOT 'below the exact ground state'. There is no exact reference at 8x8 or 10x10: ED for this model reaches about 6x6, and the paper correctly uses 6x6 ED (-0.5038) as its only exact anchor. Chen & Heyl's -0.497715(9) is a zero-variance extrapolation, not a bound, so a lower variational energy would only mean the extrapolation carries systematic error. The sigma^2 is per site, so the V-score is 5.6e-3 and not a range. Separately, the paper is internally inconsistent about it: Table 1 gives sigma^2 = 1.4e-3 for the 8x8 run while the J2 scan lists 0.0034 at J2 = 0.50, which would make the V-score 1.4e-2 and the contradiction larger. No variance is reported at 10x10 at all, so that row's flag rests only on it being an unclaimed record.
Evidence. arXiv:2607.00398 Tables 1-3; V-scores recomputed from this instance's own rows.