chore: finalize repo polish and reproducibility docs

Add contributing guidance and reproducibility notes, add a CLI script entrypoint, and remove tracked OS metadata files for cleaner repository hygiene.

Made-with: Cursor

Author: rsd-darshan

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+# Contributing to NCG
+
+Thanks for your interest in improving NCG.
+
+## Development Setup
+
+```bash
+git clone https://github.com/rsd-darshan/NCG.git
+cd NCG
+pip install -e ".[dev]"
+```
+
+## Running Tests
+
+Run the fast unit-test suite (same policy as CI):
+
+```bash
+pytest -q tests -m "not integration"
+```
+
+Run all tests including dataset-dependent integration tests:
+
+```bash
+pytest -q tests
+```
+
+## CI Behavior
+
+GitHub Actions runs tests on Python 3.9 and 3.11.
+Tests marked `integration` are excluded in CI because they require dataset downloads.
+
+## Reproducibility Guidance
+
+- Always report the seed list you used.
+- Prefer multiple-seed summaries rather than single-seed claims.
+- Keep final tables in `results*/results_table.csv`.
+
+## Code Style
+
+- Keep modules small and focused.
+- Add tests for behavior changes.
+- Avoid committing local environment files (`.venv*`, `.DS_Store`) or checkpoints.

README.md

@@ -173,6 +173,23 @@ python scripts/main.py --benchmark split_cifar10 --seeds 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49
 
 CI note: GitHub Actions runs unit tests on Python 3.9/3.11, excluding `integration` tests that require dataset downloads.
 
+Results policy: this repository tracks curated result tables/figures used in the README, while large training artifacts (checkpoints, raw dumps) are ignored.
+
+## Reproducibility
+
+- Environment: Python 3.9+ and PyTorch 2.0+.
+- Determinism: set a fixed seed via `ncg.set_seed(seed)` and run multiple seeds for robust reporting.
+- Suggested command:
+
+```bash
+python scripts/main.py --benchmark split_cifar10 --seeds 42 43 44 45 46
+```
+
+- Output locations:
+  - `results/results_table.csv`
+  - `results_cifar10/results_table.csv`
+  - `results*/figures/`
+
 ## Convergence Diagnostics
 
 ```python

pyproject.toml

@@ -44,6 +44,9 @@ Homepage = "https://github.com/rsd-darshan/NCG"
 Repository = "https://github.com/rsd-darshan/NCG"
 Issues = "https://github.com/rsd-darshan/NCG/issues"
 
+[project.scripts]
+ncg-run = "scripts.main:main"
+
 [tool.setuptools.packages.find]
 where = ["."]
 include = ["ncg*"]