Towards Physically Interpretable World Models: Meaningful Weakly Supervised Representations for Visual Trajectory Prediction

Deep learning models are increasingly employed for perception, prediction, and control in complex systems. Embedding physical knowledge into these models is crucial for achieving realistic and consistent outputs, a challenge often addressed by physics-informed machine learning. However, integrating physical knowledge with representation learning becomes difficult when dealing with high-dimensional observation data, such as images, particularly under conditions of incomplete or imprecise state information. To address this, we propose Physically Interpretable World Models, a novel architecture that aligns learned latent representations with real-world physical quantities. Our method combines a variational autoencoder with a dynamical model that incorporates unknown system parameters, enabling the discovery of physically meaningful representations. By employing weak supervision with interval-based constraints, our approach eliminates the reliance on ground-truth physical annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the quality of learned representations while achieving accurate predictions of future states, advancing the field of representation learning in dynamic systems.

Language-Enhanced Latent Representations for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Autonomous Driving

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential in autonomous driving, to determine when learning-based components encounter unexpected inputs. Traditional detectors typically use encoder models with fixed settings, thus lacking effective human interaction capabilities. With the rise of large foundation models, multimodal inputs offer the possibility of taking human language as a latent representation, thus enabling language-defined OOD detection. In this paper, we use the cosine similarity of image and text representations encoded by the multimodal model CLIP as a new representation to improve the transparency and controllability of latent encodings used for visual anomaly detection. We compare our approach with existing pre-trained encoders that can only produce latent representations that are meaningless from the user's standpoint. Our experiments on realistic driving data show that the language-based latent representation performs better than the traditional representation of the vision encoder and helps improve the detection performance when combined with standard representations.

Zero-shot Safety Prediction for Autonomous Robots with Foundation World Models

A world model creates a surrogate world to train a controller and predict safety violations by learning the internal dynamic model of systems. However, the existing world models rely solely on statistical learning of how observations change in response to actions, lacking precise quantification of how accurate the surrogate dynamics are, which poses a significant challenge in safety-critical systems. To address this challenge, we propose foundation world models that embed observations into meaningful and causally latent representations. This enables the surrogate dynamics to directly predict causal future states by leveraging a training-free large language model. In two common benchmarks, this novel model outperforms standard world models in the safety prediction task and has a performance comparable to supervised learning despite not using any data. We evaluate its performance with a more specialized and system-relevant metric by comparing estimated states instead of aggregating observation-wide error.

How Safe Am I Given What I See? Calibrated Prediction of Safety Chances for Image-Controlled Autonomy

End-to-end learning has emerged as a major paradigm for developing autonomous systems. Unfortunately, with its performance and convenience comes an even greater challenge of safety assurance. A key factor of this challenge is the absence of the notion of a low-dimensional and interpretable dynamical state, around which traditional assurance methods revolve. Focusing on the online safety prediction problem, this paper proposes a configurable family of learning pipelines based on generative world models, which do not require low-dimensional states. To implement these pipelines, we overcome the challenges of learning safety-informed latent representations and missing safety labels under prediction-induced distribution shift. These pipelines come with statistical calibration guarantees on their safety chance predictions based on conformal prediction. We perform an extensive evaluation of the proposed learning pipelines on two case studies of image-controlled systems: a racing car and a cartpole.