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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13558 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13558/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
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- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02483/) (2023)
- [Concrete Problems in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06565/) (2016)
- [Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01405/) (2023)
- [Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06674/) (2023)
- [Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03286/) (2022)
- [Show Your Work: Scratchpads for Intermediate Computation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00114/) (2021)
- [Neural Turing Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.5401/) (2014)
- [NeMo Guardrails: A Toolkit for Controllable and Safe LLM Applications with Programmable Rails](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10501/) (2023)
- [Memorizing Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08913/) (2022)
- [A comparison of Vector Symbolic Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11797/) (2020)
- [A Theoretical Perspective on Hyperdimensional Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07426/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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/√2 ≈ 0.707 (regardless of noise depth or content), continuous-noise robustness 2Phi(1/σ) - 1, and multi-signal capacity degradation ≈√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.
