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arXiv · 2608.13901

Ontology-Grounded World Models for Failure Diagnosis and Closed-Loop Repair in Physical AI Systems

Kailin Wang·Haoxiang Jie·Yaoyuan Yan·Jiacheng Zhou·Zhiyou Heng
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Abstract

EV-WM represents candidate quality with feature and event scores, but these scores do not explicitly record an unmet task predicate, a route label for an available correction mechanism, or a post-correction acceptance result. We present Onto-EV-WM, an ontology-grounded diagnosis and verification-gated correction interface layered above EV-WM rather than a replacement world-model architecture. The implemented task-local TBox defines entity types, predicate signatures, and constraints; source-specific grounding maps predicted or simulator-observed states to task ABoxes; and deterministic rules retain each missing predicate and its arguments when assigning a route label. Learned or heuristic proposers remain separate from this symbolic interface; native task predicates determine acceptance, and the bounded protocol determines whether a failed verification is retried. In the aligned PointMaze evaluation, EV-WM and Onto-EV-WM both report 94% success, with mean final-state distances of 0.90573 and 0.61177, respectively; the separately budgeted search reaches 100% success. On LIBERO-Goal, the ontology represents failed task conditions as typed records, retains their predicate arguments, and associates them with the declared source/joint correction route and predicate-gated acceptance; the complete configuration reports 93.8% corrected-window success on seed 0 and 94.05 +- 0.30% across four evaluation-sampling seeds. On the fixed 10,030-task LIBERO-Plus registry, Onto-EV-WM succeeds on 8,526 tasks (85.00%), with suite-level success rates of 65.98% for LIBERO-10, 91.39% for LIBERO-Goal, and 91.38% for both LIBERO-Object and LIBERO-Spatial. These numbers report the performance of the complete ontology-grounded configurations under the tested simulator protocols; an ontology-only causal share is not measured separately, and real-robot recovery is not evaluated.

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Kailin Wang, Haoxiang Jie, Yaoyuan Yan, Jiacheng Zhou, Zhiyou Heng. 2026-08-14. Ontology-Grounded World Models for Failure Diagnosis and Closed-Loop Repair in Physical AI Systems. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13901

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