fix: retry failed model inspections and preserve rejection evidence

Do not cache transient repository-list failures as empty weight sets.
Deduplicate normalized file paths without lowering reported file sizes.
Record whitelisted OOM evidence and bounded discovery diagnostics.

tests/test_candidate_preflight.py

@@ -243,6 +243,26 @@ class CandidatePreflightTests(unittest.TestCase):
         self.assertFalse(assessment.allowed)
         self.assertEqual("recursive_repository_on_disk", assessment.metadata["memorySizingBasis"])
 
+    def test_memory_diagnostics_distinguish_published_upper_bound(self) -> None:
+        gib = 1024 ** 3
+        inspection = ModelInspection(
+            repo_id="owner/published-larger",
+            file_paths=["config.json", "tokenizer.json", "model.safetensors"],
+            file_sizes={"config.json": 0, "tokenizer.json": 0, "model.safetensors": 20 * gib},
+            weight_files=["model.safetensors"],
+            model_config={"model_type": "qwen2"},
+            published_size_bytes=40 * gib,
+        )
+        assessment = CandidatePreflightAdvisor(gpu_memory_gib={"gpu": 32}).assess(
+            inspection=inspection, task_type="text-generation", target_gpu="gpu",
+            framework="vllm", config_params="max_model_len: 4096",
+        )
+        self.assertEqual("preflight_predicted_oom", assessment.reason)
+        self.assertEqual(20 * gib, assessment.metadata["recursiveRepositoryBytes"])
+        self.assertEqual(40 * gib, assessment.metadata["publishedSizeBytes"])
+        self.assertEqual(48.0, assessment.metadata["estimatedRequiredGiB"])
+        self.assertEqual("published_repository_upper_bound", assessment.metadata["memorySizingBasis"])
+
     def test_p800_verified_capacity_accepts_80_gib_repository_boundary(self) -> None:
         gib = 1024**3