Skip to content
#machine learning #robotics Preprint Open access

Testing Between the Test Cases: Proving End-to-End Steering in Conditions You Never Drove

Menuka Ghalan Charles Rodgers Zachary D. Asher
Sep 2026
Machine Learning Robotics

Abstract

AI-based automated vehicle testing is challenging because a model that passes every test condition can still fail in the real world. Formal verification offers a way to directly address this gap. On a simulated highway and an arterial road we trained two small end-to-end steering networks each in CARLA, one on clear conditions alone and one on clear, fog, night and low sun. All four models were driven against a 2.19 ft lane-departure budget. Without driving again, we used bound propagation, a formal method that reads the trained weights, to compute how far steering can drift at every disturbance strength between two captured images. One calculation covers more than a campaign could drive: on the arterial it spans 133 poses, where ten intensities each would be 10^133 combinations, in minutes on one GPU. Not only did formal verification find conditions that broke the clear-trained policy without simulation testing, it provided some preliminary evidence for potential failures between the test cases. Our overall conclusion is that formal verification is a viable complement to simulation, and could be adopted as a part of verification and validation for automated driving.

View source

Similar papers

#machine learning Review Open access Oct 2014

Software development in startup companies: A systematic mapping study

The results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.

Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al. · 394 citations · ⚡54

Diffusion models as plug-and-play priors

The possibility of inferring high-dimensional data inference in a model that consists of a prior and an auxiliary differentiable constraint given some additional information is considered, thereby allowing a range of potential applications in adapting models to new domains and tasks.

Alexandros Graikos, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, N. Jojic et al. · 316 citations · ⚡15

Trajectory Balance: Improved Credit Assignment in GFlowNets

It is proved that any global minimizer of the trajectory balance objective can define a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution, and empirically demonstrate the benefits of the trajectories balance objective for GFlowNet convergence, diversity of generated samples, and robustness to long action sequences and large action spaces.

Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Moksh Jain, Emmanuel Bengio et al. · 302 citations · ⚡60
#machine learning Review Open access Jun 2014

Why Early-Stage Software Startups Fail: A Behavioral Framework

This state-of-practice investigation was performed using a literature review followed by a multiple-case study approach and presents how inconsistency between managerial strategies and execution can lead to failure by means of a behavioral framework.

Carmine Giardino, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson · 175 citations · ⚡19
#artificial intelligence Open access Jul 2024

Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model Retrieval

This work investigates the possibilities of using LLMs in a resume screening setting via a document retrieval framework that simulates job candidate selection and finds that the MTEs are biased, significantly favoring White-associated names in 85% of cases and female-associated names in only 11.1% of cases.

Kyra Wilson, Aylin Caliskan · 131 citations · ⚡8
#machine learning Review Open access Oct 2016

“Failures” to be celebrated: an analysis of major pivots of software startups

This study conducts a case survey study based on the secondary data of the major pivots happened in 49 software startups, and demonstrates that customer need pivot is the most common among all pivot types.

Sohaib Shahid Bajwa, Xiaofeng Wang, Anh Nguyen-Duc et al. · 127 citations · ⚡15

Related blog posts

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.