Many have gone through the “I conquered Numerai” to “darn, it was a leak” cycle, so good on you for catching it early. The gentle truth is that corr around 0.0050 with Sharpe ~0.38 is not quite “elite-tier” yet; I think @svendaj open-source Kaggle examples are a very good benchmark to learn from: New Target for Payouts and Data V5.2 - Faith II - #3 by svendaj . Also, AI polish is not only fine but even desirable (imho), but the writeup makes me wonder who or what is really entering the tournament here (Qwen, is that you? 
). Either way, welcome, and keep going.