Design of the Safety Case of the Reinforcement Learning-Enabled Component of a Quanser Autonomous Vehicle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Safety assurance is paramount across industries where mission-critical systems operate, mitigating risks of catas-trophic failures. Safety cases play a pivotal role, particularly in safety critical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles), in ensuring system reliability and acceptability, providing a structured argument supported by evidence. However, in the safety case literature, it is challenging to get access to a complete safety case, which is crucial for the research community to contribute in this domain. Hence, in this research, we propose an approach to create a safety case for ML-enabled autonomous vehicle, specifically, the Quanser Qcar. We present a complete safety case for a reinforcement learning algorithm applied on the Quanser Qcar to avoid collisions in an unsignalized 4-way intersection. Finally, we report the lessons learned and provide the safety case for the research community to reuse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".