Evidence of Absence: Cross-Modal Abductive Risk Perception to Sustain World Models When Vision Fails

Abstract

A structured world-state (entities, relations, context, and predictive cues) is designed to preserve prediction-critical content when perception degrades, but it presumes observations to populate it; when the primary visual modality is occluded or degraded, those observations may be missing. We address how to sustain the world model from a complementary modality by treating the absence of expected co-evidence as evidence of a hidden cause. The abductive framework is modality-agnostic; this article instantiates it acoustically. A microphone-array front-end estimates the bearing of engine and tire sources and extracts approach-rate evidence (Doppler when a stable tone exists, a broadband looming readout otherwise); the event "signature present, visual co-evidence absent" then triggers abductive inference of a hidden road user, emitting a calibrated risk advisory rather than a control command. Recoverability of the hidden state is analyzed as an identifiability question separating shared from modality-unique information, and cueing is cast as Neyman-Pearson detection under an explicit false-alarm budget. On real occluded-approach recordings at blind junctions, the method warns a mean 1.7 seconds before line-of-sight entry, matches the sustained-window variant of the published acoustic baseline's detection rate with 42% fewer false alarms, localizes to 3.4 degrees median once in view, is well calibrated (expected calibration error 0.034), and keeps hazard awareness above 0.87 under staged vision degradation that collapses a vision-only channel to 0.03. We also measure the method's limits: calibration transfers to an unseen junction almost losslessly, the signature classifier does not, and moving-ego noise is the binding deployment constraint.