Audit Before You Commit: Locating Belief Failures in Active Identification for One-Shot Manipulation

Abstract

A robot that probes a few times before one irreversible action, such as tapping a surface before inserting a peg, must decide when the evidence is enough to commit. We argue that this decision rests on two conditions that existing methods do not separate: the belief must still cover the truth in the coordinate that decides the action, and the failure model that scores actions must track realized failure. We audit both conditions separately, offline and with ground truth, on a deployed probe-then-commit pipeline: a particle belief, a scenario failure score, and one commit. On simulated insertion, more taps sharpen the belief while the truth leaves its support on 16.9% of episodes and the failure score turns optimistic by 0.31. Conformal calibration restores coverage but not the decision: confidently wrong instances still pass a confidence gate. The audit's signatures instead point at the observation model, where a hand scan finds a 2.1 mm error in the tap boundary. Correcting that one number cuts failure from 0.354 to 0.112 on untouched instances and transfers unrefitted to a second engine, while in a third engine the same audit suggests an execution-model mismatch instead. Across seven task families in three engines, a few probes at a fixed executor reduce miss or failure. On a physical arm inserting a tool into a rigid pocket by touch, the gain and the audit's two conditions reproduce, and replaying the recorded taps under an injected model error shows the audit's signature on real data. Additional materials are available at https://sites.google.com/view/auditbeforeyoucommit.