| title | The Mask Is Not the Model: Auditing Prefix Invariance in Attention, State-Space, and Hybrid Sequence Models |
|---|---|
| authors | Taebong Kim, Youngsik Hong, Minsik Kim, Sunyoung Choi, Jaewon Jang, Minseo Kim |
| date | 2026-08-24 |
| venue | arXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed) |
| id | arXiv:2608.22876 |
| affiliation | VIDraft |
| upvotes | 3 (Hugging Face Daily Papers, 2026-11-01) |
| links | abs pdf hf |
| abstract | We formalize prefix invariance: representations at position t must not depend on future inputs. We give a lightweight audit, two forward passes, no training or gradients, that localizes exactly where causality breaks. Attention-mask inspection is incomplete: leaks can occur via scans or normalization despite correct masks. Across 192 injected-fault trials on eight checkpoints, mask inspection found none, while our audit localized all 192/192, also finding a defect in Zamba2 and Nemotron-H. |
cite
@misc{kim2026mask,
title={The Mask Is Not the Model: Auditing Prefix Invariance in Attention, State-Space, and Hybrid Sequence Models},
author={Taebong Kim and Youngsik Hong and Minsik Kim and Sunyoung Choi and Jaewon Jang and Minseo Kim},
year={2026},
eprint={2608.22876},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22876}
}