diff --git a/crates/larql-inference/src/forward/memit.rs b/crates/larql-inference/src/forward/memit.rs
index 4c24fc023..eee7f7ce1 100644
--- a/crates/larql-inference/src/forward/memit.rs
+++ b/crates/larql-inference/src/forward/memit.rs
@@ -427,8 +427,27 @@ fn memit_solve_layer(
         }
     }
 
-    let l = larql_compute::cpu::ops::linalg::cholesky(&cov_f64, ridge)
-        .map_err(|e| format!("MEMIT: Cholesky failed — {e}"))?;
+    // Adaptive ridge: if f64 accumulation still lands a negative pivot
+    // (rare — mostly defends against non-Gemma architectures we haven't
+    // profiled), escalate ridge up to 4 steps before giving up.
+    let mut current_ridge = ridge;
+    let l = loop {
+        match larql_compute::cpu::ops::linalg::cholesky(&cov_f64, current_ridge) {
+            Ok(l) => {
+                if current_ridge > ridge {
+                    eprintln!("MEMIT: Cholesky needed ridge escalation {ridge} → {current_ridge}");
+                }
+                break l;
+            }
+            Err(e) if current_ridge < ridge * 1000.0 => {
+                current_ridge *= 10.0;
+                eprintln!(
+                    "MEMIT: Cholesky pivot failed ({e}); retrying with ridge={current_ridge}"
+                );
+            }
+            Err(e) => return Err(format!("MEMIT: Cholesky failed after escalation — {e}")),
+        }
+    };
 
     // Q = K @ C⁻¹  [N × ffn_dim]
     // We compute this as: for each fact i, q_i = C⁻¹ @ k_i (column),
diff --git a/crates/larql-inference/src/forward/trace.rs b/crates/larql-inference/src/forward/trace.rs
index 62ce36756..5c88f1cd1 100644
--- a/crates/larql-inference/src/forward/trace.rs
+++ b/crates/larql-inference/src/forward/trace.rs
@@ -298,9 +298,16 @@ pub fn estimate_ffn_covariance(
     let ffn_dim = first.shape()[1];
 
     // Accumulator — K^T K across all sampled token positions.
-    // Float64 would be safer but Array2<f32> suffices at our scales
-    // (we'll round to f32 when writing to disk anyway).
-    let mut ktk = Array2::<f32>::zeros((ffn_dim, ffn_dim));
+    //
+    // Accumulate in f64. With ffn_dim in the thousands and activation
+    // magnitudes ~1e3 (observed on Gemma 4 26B-A4B, ffn_dim = 2112), each
+    // entry grows to ~1e6 * N; f32 (24-bit mantissa) loses the low-order
+    // contributions and the accumulated Gram matrix stops being numerically
+    // PSD, so the downstream Cholesky in memit.rs hits a negative pivot.
+    // Converting to f64 *after* accumulation (memit.rs `cov_f64`) cannot
+    // recover precision that was already lost here. We downcast to f32 once,
+    // at the boundary, when returning.
+    let mut ktk = Array2::<f64>::zeros((ffn_dim, ffn_dim));
     let mut total_samples: usize = 0;
 
     // Re-process the first capture so we don't double-count it.
@@ -308,12 +315,12 @@ pub fn estimate_ffn_covariance(
     // with itself, summed across rows.
     for row in first.rows() {
         for i in 0..ffn_dim {
-            let vi = row[i];
+            let vi = row[i] as f64;
             if vi == 0.0 {
                 continue;
             }
             for j in 0..ffn_dim {
-                ktk[[i, j]] += vi * row[j];
+                ktk[[i, j]] += vi * (row[j] as f64);
             }
         }
         total_samples += 1;
@@ -331,12 +338,12 @@ pub fn estimate_ffn_covariance(
         };
         for row in k.rows() {
             for i in 0..ffn_dim {
-                let vi = row[i];
+                let vi = row[i] as f64;
                 if vi == 0.0 {
                     continue;
                 }
                 for j in 0..ffn_dim {
-                    ktk[[i, j]] += vi * row[j];
+                    ktk[[i, j]] += vi * (row[j] as f64);
                 }
             }
             total_samples += 1;
@@ -347,10 +354,11 @@ pub fn estimate_ffn_covariance(
         return None;
     }
 
-    // C = (K^T K) / N
-    let scale = 1.0 / total_samples as f32;
+    // C = (K^T K) / N, then downcast to f32 once at the boundary.
+    let scale = 1.0_f64 / total_samples as f64;
     ktk.mapv_inplace(|v| v * scale);
-    Some((ktk, total_samples))
+    let ktk_f32 = ktk.mapv(|v| v as f32);
+    Some((ktk_f32, total_samples))
 }
 
 /// Run a forward pass and capture both residuals and sparse activations.