Zien Guo

Canonicalizing the Wrong Thing: Quotient-Aligned Gauge Fixing for Semantic Representations

This preprint studies when prediction-equivalent representations are interchangeable under a declared downstream interface. It formalizes quotient-aligned representative selection, shows that factor-balance invariants can fail to distinguish operationally different coordinates, a...

Canonicalizing the Wrong Thing: Quotient-Aligned Gauge Fixing for Semantic Representations

Preprint, version 1. Modern predictive models often admit a representation gauge: optimization, normalization, or post-processing may select a stable representative without selecting the distinctions required by downstream use. We formalize quotient alignment: a selection criteri...