Auditing Single-Query Recoverability in Self-Supervised Representations

Modern transformation-aware self-supervised representations are routinely scored under protocols that grant the evaluator paired views, augmentation labels, or teacher anchors --- none of which the deployed predictor ever sees. We audit the gap that opens once these privileges are removed and only a single query remains. The finding is a systematic evaluation illusion: on 3DIEBench-Honest, honest single-query rotation errors are typically $2{-}3\times$ as large as native transformation scores, consistently across comparators and matched-utility thresholds. To make this gap measurable, we introduce a deployment-honest evaluation contract specifying a one-query test interface, matched semantic utility, a strongest-eligible-neighbor headline with tail summaries, and explicit privilege accounting. Theory and experiments are in service of the contract: lower-bound analysis grounds the contract at the interface level, while a positive control supplies a non-vacuous upper certificate under declared privileges. We exercise the contract on a generated law, on 3DIEBench-Honest, and on PTB-XL. The operational conclusion is that native transformation-aware success is not, on its own, a single-query deployment certificate.