Holographic Invariant Storage: Design-Time Safety Contracts via Vector Symbolic Architectures

Abstract

We introduce Holographic Invariant Storage (HIS), a protocol that assembles known properties of bipolar Vector Symbolic Architectures into a design-time safety contract for LLM context-drift mitigation. The contract provides three closed-form guarantees evaluable before deployment: single-signal recovery fidelity converging to $1/\sqrt{2}\approx 0.707$ (regardless of noise depth or content), continuous-noise robustness $2\Phi (1/\sigma )-1$, and multi-signal capacity degradation $\approx \sqrt{1/(K+1)}$. These bounds, validated by Monte Carlo simulation ($n=1,000$), enable a systems engineer to budget recovery fidelity and codebook capacity at design time -- a property no timer or embedding-distance metric provides. A pilot behavioral experiment (four LLMs, 2B--7B, 720 trials) confirms that safety re-injection improves adherence at the 2B scale; full results are in an appendix.

The experiment has a design defect: the VSA drift trigger was not in the causal path of its own runs, so the results do not test the claimed mechanism. Clean-room replication: content-aware re-injection beats neither random re-injection (p=0.46) nor a fixed timer (p=0.29), while positive controls confirm task signal (p=0.002, p=0.001). The conclusions are unsupported and should not be cited