arXiv subjects

Gerhard Yu

Publications and source records attributed to Gerhard Yu.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Safety Case Patterns for VLA-based driving systems: Insights from SimLingo

Vision-Language-Action (VLA)-based driving systems represent a significant paradigm shift in autonomous driving since, by combining traffic scene understanding, linguistic interpretation, and action generation, these systems enable more flexible, adaptive, and instruction-responsive driving behaviors. However, despite their growing adoption and potential to support socially responsible autonomous driving as well as understanding high-level human instructions, VLA-based driving systems may exhibit new types of hazardous behaviors. For instance, the integration of open-ended natural language inputs (e.g., user or navigation instructions) into the multimodal control loop may lead to unpredictable and unsafe behaviors that could endanger vehicle occupants and pedestrians. Hence, assuring the safety of these systems is crucial to help build trust in their operations. To support this, we propose a novel safety case design approach called RAISE. Our approach introduces novel patterns tailored to instruction-based driving systems such as VLA-based driving systems, an extension of Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA) detailing safe scenarios and their outcomes, and a design technique to create the safety cases of VLA-based driving systems. A case study on SimLingo illustrates how our approach can be used to construct rigorous, evidence-based safety claims for this emerging class of autonomous driving systems.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

LLMs as Judges: Toward The Automatic Review of GSN-compliant Assurance Cases

Assurance cases allow verifying the correct implementation of certain non-functional requirements of mission-critical systems, including their safety, security, and reliability. They can be used in the specification of autonomous driving, avionics, air traffic control, and similar systems. They aim to reduce risks of harm of all kinds including human mortality, environmental damage, and financial loss. However, assurance cases often tend to be organized as extensive documents spanning hundreds of pages, making their creation, review, and maintenance error-prone, time-consuming, and tedious. Therefore, there is a growing need to leverage (semi-)automated techniques, such as those powered by generative AI and large language models (LLMs), to enhance efficiency, consistency, and accuracy across the entire assurance-case lifecycle. In this paper, we focus on assurance case review, a critical task that ensures the quality of assurance cases and therefore fosters their acceptance by regulatory authorities. We propose a novel approach that leverages the \textit{LLM-as-a-judge} paradigm to automate the review process. Specifically, we propose new predicate-based rules that formalize well-established assurance case review criteria, allowing us to craft LLM prompts tailored to the review task. Our experiments on several state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, DeepSeek-R1, and Gemini 2.0 Flash) show that, while most LLMs yield relatively good review capabilities, DeepSeek-R1 and GPT-4.1 demonstrate superior performance, with DeepSeek-R1 ultimately outperforming GPT-4.1. However, our experimental results also suggest that human reviewers are still needed to refine the reviews LLMs yield.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

SmartGSN: an online tool to semi-automatically manage assurance cases

Developing industry-wide standards and ensuring producers of mission-critical systems comply with them is crucial to fostering consumer acceptance. Producers of such systems can rely on assurance cases to demonstrate to regulatory authorities how they have complied with such standards to help prevent system failure, which could result in fatalities and environmental damage. In this paper, we introduce SmartGSN, an innovative online tool that relies on Large Language Models to (semi-)automate the management of assurance cases complying with GSN - a very popular notation to graphically represent assurance cases. The evaluation of SmartGSN demonstrates its strong capability to detect assurance case patterns within the assurance cases manually created for five systems spanning several application domains. SmartGSN is accessible online at [https://smartgsn.vercel.app], and a demonstration video can be viewed at [https://youtu.be/qLrTHf-SZbM]

cs.SE↗