SFGA: A Statistics-First Gating Architecture with Adjudicative Escalation for Trustworthy SFT Data Procurement

Procuring supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data forces a buyer to decide, before any downstream training, whether a candidate corpus is worth acquiring. We present, a statistics-first gating architecture that treats procurement as a cost-aware routing problem over three intrinsic quality axes -- diversity, utility, and redundancy. Cheap blind measurements are summarised into per-axis estimates with confidence intervals; a gate accepts a decision only when intervals are tight, sample sizes are adequate, and the axes agree, otherwise it escalates the case to an adjudicative debate between a buy-advocate and a reject-advocate judge, resolved by a presiding verdict. On a controlled benchmark of 12 datasets (2 times 3 times 2 grid over the three axes) with 5 seeds, the gate reaches 0.90 accuracy and 0.83 F 1 at 0.017 per unit, sitting between an always-verify baseline (0.75) and an oracle upper bound (0.98) while spending less than always-escalate (0.020). We further report honest negative diagnostics of the debate path: a con-side win rate of 0.80 (p about3 times 10-6) and a 52% position-flip rate under advocate swapping expose negativity and positional biases that a naive LLM-judge would hide. We frame the injected-knob evaluation explicitly as a controlled synthetic benchmark for measurement fidelity and routing calibration, and delimit external validity as future work.