Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.41130

One Verdict Is Not Enough: Regression Testing Learned World Models and Their Test Harnesses

Abstract

Learned world models ship as software components whose model versions, preprocessing, and test harnesses change between releases. Work on model updates already counts per-sample regressions, or negative flips, that an accuracy check hides. Two problems remain: a test can pass under one configuration and fail under another, and a harness fault can produce erroneous scores and wrong verdicts without a crash. We present TetraState, a regression-testing protocol for paired possible/impossible video tests. Each test runs under four fixed model-native configurations; its number of correct verdicts assigns one of four outcome classes. Inconclusive tests and failed executions are reported separately alongside the verdict rate. Revisions are compared by per-test outcome transitions, and the harness is versioned as part of the system under test. On all 506 IntPhys 2 Main tests and two heterogeneous systems, Cosmos 3 Nano and V-JEPA 2, two V-JEPA 2 harness revisions move modal accuracy by only 0.2 and 2.6 points yet change 11 and 214 test labels; in the second, accuracy rises although fewer tests are judged correctly, and 43 regressions keep the modal verdict, so a modal-verdict flip check misses them. These results outline a research agenda on configuration-level regression oracles for learned components.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Junyu Huo, Zihao Wan, Ziqi Mao, Gouri Ginde. 2026-10-30. One Verdict Is Not Enough: Regression Testing Learned World Models and Their Test Harnesses. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41130

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Psychological Safety Framework in Pull-based Open Source Projects

Psychological safety (PS) refers to the belief that team members can speak up, ask questions, and make mistakes without fear of negative consequences. Although PS has been studied in traditional software teams, less is known about how it may appear in pull-based open-source software development, where contributors are self-directed and often collaborate voluntarily. This paper introduces a theory-informed framework for understanding how PS may be reflected in pull request (PR) interactions. We investigate the framework through a mixed-methods approach combining repository-based analysis and a survey of OSS contributors. First, we constructed a PS index using nine observable PR interaction indicators extracted from 60,685 PRs across 26 GitHub repositories. Second, we surveyed 57 OSS contributors about their perceived PS and experiences of corresponding PR interactions. All nine surveyed interaction indicators were significantly and positively associated with perceived PS. However, the repository-based index was not significantly associated with survey-reported PS. Contributors' open-ended responses further highlighted the importance of feedback quality, opportunities to participate, and how PR outcomes are interpreted. Together, our framework and mixed-methods findings provide initial insights into how PS may be reflected in PR interactions, highlighting the importance of both PR interaction patterns and contributors' experiences.

cs.SE↗

Structuring license permissiveness from pairwise comparisons

Licenses are legal instruments that inventors rely upon to protect the technologies they build and regulate how they are used---however, the nature of their authorship and selection implies that how they are interpreted, chosen, and enforced is largely unstructured. In practice, this makes it difficult to compare licenses at scale---when is one license considered more permissive than the other, and when are their terms incomparable to each other? Currently, there is a growing list of licenses that are introduced and used, yet no systematic way to study their relationships. This matters for platforms such as Hugging Face, GitHub, and the Python Package Index, where developers publish or build upon technologies that each have their own licenses. Using large language models (LLMs), we introduce methods for comparing licenses at scale: first, in a pairwise fashion to construct and validate a partial ordering based on permissiveness; and by drawing on existing taxonomies of software licenses. Then, we try to recover the structure with the Bradley-Terry model to see if permissiveness can be judged more cheaply and observe a loss of $\sim$20\%---and classify this loss to feature coverage. The former coupled with model rationale allows us to trace restrictiveness, and the latter allows us to understand license selection as a combination of shared provisions.

cs.SE↗

Repository and Issue Characteristics of Early GenAI Adopters on GitHub

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has introduced new forms of AI assistance into software development, but less is known about the repositories and issues of early adopters of GenAI tools. We study the repository and issue characteristics of early adopters who state interest in GenAI on their public profiles on GitHub by analyzing 531 early adopters, 100 of their repositories with AI-tool configuration files (ACFs), 100 matched control repositories without ACFs, and 370 issues from the two repository groups. Repositories with ACFs show modest distributional differences in selected README structural characteristics. They contain longer README files with more code blocks and include a license more often, while repositories without ACFs contain more external URLs. The category distributions of the two repository groups show weak evidence of a difference. Once GenAI relatedness is held fixed, we detect no difference in issue Type or Outcome between the two repository groups. Our data, collected from May to August 2025, record how early adopters developed software in Software Engineering 2.0, the stage in which developers use both AI assistants and autonomous AI agents. When these agents become the norm, later studies can compare their data with ours.

cs.SE↗