Position: Certifiable State Integrity Should Be Built from Local Validity, Not Global Scale

Abstract

Breakthroughs in language and vision have motivated increasingly general foundation models for time series and physical dynamics, where evidence is promising but less mature. In safety-critical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), globally parameterized dynamics models must remain valid through regime shifts, degradation, and lifecycle updates while supporting traceable assurance evidence. We argue that shared global parameters couple adaptation, frequency-sensitive fault representation, and verification evidence in ways that obstruct retained regime knowledge and bounded analysis. For systems whose operating conditions can be covered by a finite set of locally valid models, assurance evidence should be organized around those bounded models and their explicit composition, not around a single globally adapted model; increasing scale cannot supply explicit validity boundaries. HYDRA is a reference architecture for this position: frozen local specialists, runtime arbitration, and explicit coverage-gap monitoring. It illustrates how modular auditability and formal analysis of bounded components support Certifiable State Integrity, while whole-system certification, switching guarantees, and empirical validation remain separate obligations.