TL;DR. Best with the LoRA at 100% (reward 0.629, just above the prompt-only 0.604). Use the evolved prompt plus the 100% merge when you need genuine sadness — it pushes target-emotion strength from 0.007 to 0.152 and genuineness to 0.238. The cost is steep on intelligibility and quality: WER jumps 0.146 to 0.515 and the quality proxy falls 0.546 to 0.348, so keep lines short. It also drags in Distress and Helplessness (both corr ~0.93), so the voice sounds despairing rather than merely melancholy; if you need clean, intelligible sadness, prompt-only BASE_P (WER 0.146) is nearly as rewarding.
Without a LoRA
Best: evolved prompt, no LoRA → reward 0.60
GENERAL: A voice powerfully expressing sadness, a soft, grief-worn voice, heavy and slow, on the edge of tears, impossible to hide.
SCRIPT: (quietly, grief-stricken, near tears) "<neutral sentence>" · temp 1.0 top_p 0.95 top_k 40
Best with the LoRA at 100% (reward 0.629, just above the prompt-only 0.604). Use the evolved prompt plus the 100% merge when you need genuine sadness — it pushes target-emotion strength from 0.007 to 0.152 and genuineness to 0.238. The cost is steep on intelligibility and quality: WER jumps 0.146 to 0.515 and the quality proxy falls 0.546 to 0.348, so keep lines short. It also drags in Distress and Helplessness (both corr ~0.93), so the voice sounds despairing rather than merely melancholy; if you need clean, intelligible sadness, prompt-only BASE_P (WER 0.146) is nearly as rewarding.