#01Nov 5, 2026
cs.RO
Failure Prediction and Classification in Vision-Language-Action Models Via Calibrated Latent Probing
Michal P. Podolinsky, Yunhao Yang, Daniel Little and 6 more
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) enable general-purpose embodied intelligence, but their performance is brittle under distribution shift, where unanticipated failures can damage equipment or endanger people. Deploying VLAs in real-world systems therefore requires a runtime monitor that is timely, calibrated, and informative while being efficient enough to run on the edge. Existing methods fail to fulfill these requirements. We present VLA-Tug, a lightweight probe over the latent layers of a VLA backbone that improves early failure detection and bounds the missed-detection and false-alarm rates, with minimal inference overhead. We show that supervising on the pre-failure segment of a trajectory increases early failure detection at matched false-positive rates by up to 30% over the strongest learned baseline. Under shift to unseen tasks, the bounds on missed-detection and false-alarm rates remain valid in up to 86% of runs, versus at most 21% for baselines. Unlike existing methods, VLA-Tug predicts the failure mode to enable corrective actions, raising top-3 accuracy on unseen tasks by up to 44% over a majority baseline. VLA-Tug enables real-time monitoring where the well-timed and informative probe supports lightweight steering that improves task success. We release a dataset of 3,180 annotated manipulation episodes to support future work on latent failure detection in VLAs at https://vla-tug.github.io.
#02Nov 5, 2026
cs.AI
ReproBridge: Building Reproducibility into ML Research Artifacts
Yubo Wang, Rui Meng, Jaehyun Nam and 2 more
Reproducing machine learning experiments requires reconstructing procedures from information scattered across papers, released code, and supporting artifacts. For coding agents, reproduction success can therefore depend on their ability to fill in missing details, rather than on the released artifacts alone. We ask whether preserving recovered procedures and decisions improves subsequent independent reproduction. We define a standardized artifact design comprising a refined codebase, environment setup, experiment launchers, and a reproduction guide, and introduce ReproBridge, an agent workflow for constructing these refined reproducible artifacts. ReproBridge-Bench provides 1,029 tasks from 387 experiments across 36 papers, anchored by five human-verified reference scores per task. Agents attempt tasks in fresh sessions with raw code or refined artifacts; a separate Auditor checks execution evidence. Across four evaluated models, refined artifacts raise mean reproduction success from 76.4% to 92.6% and reduce downstream API spending by 19.7% on average. The cross-model success-rate spread narrows from 21.6 to 3.9 percentage points, with all four models achieving mean success rates above 90%. Removing any component reduces success in the ablation study, with the largest losses from code and environment removal. These results suggest that preserving execution knowledge helps even models with lower raw-code success reproduce experiments more reliably and at lower API cost.
#03Nov 5, 2026
cs.LG
Conformal Prediction for Time-Dependent PDEs
Joshua Stiller, Annika Schneider, Eyke Hüllermeier
Uncertainty quantification is crucial in scientific machine learning, where models inform safety-critical tasks such as flood forecasting, financial risk management, and thermal control in machines. Conformal prediction provides distribution-free coverage guarantees, but in time-dependent settings common to physics and engineering, these guarantees can break down, leading to systematic undercoverage. We study this problem in the context of surrogate models for time-dependent physical systems described by partial differential equations. We prove that in a function space setting, distributions at arbitrarily close times can be mutually singular, making exact coverage guarantees impossible. We further show that in discretized settings, the total variation distance between distributions often saturates exponentially fast with the grid resolution, mandating restrictions on the spatial discretization to ensure coverage. Finally, for certain settings, we show how to use principled weighted conformal prediction to obtain finite-sample coverage guarantees over growing time horizons.
#04Nov 5, 2026
cs.CL
Understanding AI from the Inside: The State of Mechanistic Interpretability for AI Safety
Fazl Barez, Tung-Yu Wu, Hunar Batra and 24 more
Neural networks are likely to be among the most consequential artefacts in human history. As these systems become more capable and autonomous, their potential to cause societal harm also grows, making AI safety one of the defining challenges of our time. Yet we continue to build increasingly powerful systems without fully understanding how they work, how they will behave in unfamiliar situations, or how to reliably control them. Mechanistic interpretability offers a path towards understanding these systems by studying their internal representations and computations, with the aim of evaluating, predicting, and controlling behaviour. We survey mechanistic interpretability for AI safety in order to answer the question: Does understanding how models work actually make them safer? We place mechanistic interpretability in the broader context of interpretability research and compare its mechanistic evidence with behavioural evaluation. We introduce the foundations of mechanistic interpretability, including features, polysemanticity, transformer computation, and circuits, and survey methods for feature extraction and analysis, circuit discovery and causal verification, explaining intermediate representations in natural language, learning dynamics, and training-data attribution. Beyond surveying existing methods, we propose a unified framework for evaluating mechanistic interpretability claims and characterise six research orientations by their goals, assumptions, and trade-offs. Finally, we examine how mechanistic understanding can support AI safety, including knowledge editing, steering, and monitoring, and assess its limitations, failure modes, open problems, and relationship to behavioural safety measures. We also release a repository of code notebooks with worked examples that reproduce key findings from surveyed methods, allowing readers to build intuition through hands-on experimentation.
#05Nov 5, 2026
cs.RO
MOMASPLAT: Dynamic Novel-View Demonstration Augmentation for Mobile Manipulation
Sateesh Kumar, Arnav Balaji, Arpit Bahety and 3 more
Visuomotor policies trained through imitation learning are highly sensitive to changes in camera viewpoint. This is particularly problematic for mobile manipulation (MoMa), where robots rarely execute manipulation from the exact same base pose used during demonstration collection due to navigation uncertainty, localization drift, and environmental constraints. Recent approaches use novel-view synthesis (NVS) to augment demonstrations with unseen viewpoints, but they assume static scenes and therefore fail to re-render the manipulated object during the post-contact interaction phase, leaving the most critical parts of the demonstration unaugmented. We present MOMASPLAT, a novel-view demonstration augmentation framework for mobile manipulation that synthesizes full manipulation trajectories from unseen robot base poses, including dynamic object interactions. Our key insight is that standard MoMa data collection naturally provides the multiview observations needed to reconstruct both the static scene and the manipulated object in 3D. MOMASPLAT combines 3D Gaussian Splatting, feed-forward 3D foundation models, and kinematics-based action retargeting to separately reconstruct the scene and manipulated object, render them from novel viewpoints, and generate geometrically consistent synthetic demonstrations paired with transformed actions. We evaluate MOMASPLAT on five real-world mobile manipulation tasks involving both rigid and articulated objects across three scenes, and validate the fidelity of its synthesized demonstrations against ground truth in simulation. MOMASPLAT substantially improves robustness to unseen base poses, more than doubling the average success rate of the strongest baseline and maintaining non-trivial success at large base displacements where all baselines fail, while reducing the need for largescale real-world data collection.