SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

When Does Test-Time Physical Diagnosis Pay? A Frozen Policy Buys Evidence It Never Reads

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 14, 2026 · UTC

When a robot faces unfamiliar physical conditions, a common approach is to collect evidence about what changed and adapt. For such diagnosis to improve behavior, six ordered empirical conditions must hold: a meaningful reference, identifiability of the physical condition, use of the acquired evidence, decision value, selection value over a fixed alternative, and safe realization. We test this chain in controlled and public environments. It holds end to end in our controlled environments. After transfer to unseen mechanisms, however, it breaks at evidence use. On decisions requiring the full tr

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType

paper

region

Global