arXiv subjects

Nikhil Kamalkumar Advani

Publications and source records attributed to Nikhil Kamalkumar Advani.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Auditing Latent-Space Monitors for Autonomous Driving

Runtime failure monitors can use a model's internal representations to anticipate failures. We audit this monitoring strategy across two autonomous-driving tasks: online vectorized map generation with LaneSegNet and end-to-end planning with VAD. We find that frame-level errors are predictable at inference in both tasks. For LaneSegNet, a supervised latent probe reaches Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUROC) 0.780 for high Chamfer error; to our knowledge, this is the first post-hoc frame-level failure monitor for online vectorized map generation. For VAD, a supervised planning-latent probe reaches AUROC 0.868 for mean-ADE failure. Our audit shows that internal access is not necessary for strong failure prediction. A monitor using only LaneSegNet's prediction outputs reaches AUROC 0.825, while for VAD, ego state, driving command, and the planner's predicted trajectory reach 0.924 on the same mean-ADE endpoint. Adding latent features to either baseline yields no statistically resolved improvement. This observation persists across a broad suite of planning failure endpoints, including endpoints whose labels depend on geometry unavailable to the non-latent baseline. Thus, predicting failure from an internal representation does not establish that the representation provides useful information beyond observable inputs and outputs. We propose an evaluation protocol for testing the incremental value of latent access and release our per-frame failure endpoint labels.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

AI Training Manager: Bounded Closed-Loop Control of Adaptive Training Recipes

We present the AI Training Manager, a bounded LLM-based metacognitive monitoring-and-control layer for machine-learning training. The manager asynchronously observes structured telemetry from an active training run, assesses the current training regime, and selects adaptive interventions through a constrained, deterministically verified action interface. We evaluate the approach on supervised and reinforcement-learning tasks. For supervised learning, we induce a multi-objective overfitting failure in a GPT-2-style model trained on TinyStories. The manager prevents the resulting late-run validation collapse, reducing final validation loss by 54.3% relative to the same stressed recipe. For reinforcement learning, we study robotic reaching under opposing multifactor stress regimes. In a conservative regime, the manager raises final deterministic safe success from 0.413 to 0.705. In an aggressive regime, it raises safe success from 0.121 to 0.764. The same manager instructions and action surface are used in both regimes. These results suggest that bounded LLM reasoning can provide a practical metacognitive control layer over ongoing learning processes.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

GeoReFormer: Geometry-Aware Refinement for Lane Segment Detection and Topology Reasoning

Accurate 3D lane segment detection and topology reasoning are critical for structured online map construction in autonomous driving. Recent transformer-based approaches formulate this task as query-based set prediction, yet largely inherit decoder designs originally developed for compact object detection. However, lane segments are continuous polylines embedded in directed graphs, and generic query initialization and unconstrained refinement do not explicitly encode this geometric and relational structure. We propose GeoReFormer (Geometry-aware Refinement Transformer), a unified query-based architecture that embeds geometry- and topology-aware inductive biases directly within the transformer decoder. GeoReFormer introduces data-driven geometric priors for structured query initialization, bounded coordinate-space refinement for stable polyline deformation, and per-query gated topology propagation to selectively integrate relational context. On the OpenLane-V2 benchmark, GeoReFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance with 34.5% mAP while improving topology consistency over strong transformer baselines, demonstrating the utility of explicit geometric and relational structure encoding.

cs.CV↗