Context-Awareness and Interpretability of Rare Occurrences for Discovery and Formalization of Critical Failure Modes

--Vision systems are increasingly deployed in critical domains such as surveillance, law enforcement, and transportation. However, their vulnerabilities to rare or unforeseen scenarios pose significant safety risks. T o address these challenges, we introduce Context-A wareness and Interpretability of Rare Occurrences (CAIRO), an ontology-based human-assistive discovery framework for failure cases (or CP - Critical Phenomena) detection and formalization. CAIRO by design incentivizes human-in-the-loop for testing and evaluation of criticality that arises from misdetections, adversarial attacks, and hallucinations in AI black-box models. Our robust analysis of object detection model(s) failures in automated driving systems (ADS) showcases scalable and interpretable ways of formalizing the observed gaps between camera perception and real-world contexts, resulting in test cases stored as explicit knowledge graphs (in OWL/XML format) amenable for sharing, downstream analysis, logical reasoning, and accountability. I NTRODUCTION Formal verification techniques are a norm in chip design, but they remain elusive in computer vision (CV) applications. The reason being CV applications are deemed open-ended, often trained on millions of data and billions of parameters to learn a few hundreds of labels. Finetuning practices are commonly used to tailor them to specific needs, but with no standard testing procedures in place providing guidance for their application to ensure fail-safe behaviors, critical systems like Autonomous V ehicles (A V) are bound to fail [1].