Self-Attention as Transport: Limits of Symmetric Spectral Diagnostics
Every attention head defines a degree-normalized transport operator, and a growing family of diagnostics reads model behavior (hallucination among them) from its spectrum. We ask what such diagnostics can and cannot infer. The operator splits orthogonally into a symmetric part governing transport \emph{capacity} and an antisymmetric part encoding \emph{orientation}. We prove an identifiability limit: every transpose-invariant spectral diagnostic is \emph{orientation-blind} (unable to distinguish an operator from its transpose, hence blind to the orientation of information flow), with a transpose-stability bound limiting any Lipschitz diagnostic's transpose sensitivity by the asymmetry coe...
| Authors | Dominik Dahlem, Diego Maniloff, Mac Misiura |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 6 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 July 2026 |
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