CDV Crossing Domains: A Robot SOTIF Perspective

Abstract: Yoav Hollander is a world-class expert in chip verification. The company he founded, Foretellix, brought coverage-driven verification (CDV) into autonomous driving. Recently he wrote a post pushing the methodology into a much larger arena: AI alignment. This post reads that cross-domain migration from my own research field — the SOTIF four-quadrant model, the tree-like structure of Robot SOTIF, and the standards-driven Chinese context. The core question stays the same throughout: how do you know what you don’t know? ...

June 11, 2026 · 9 min · 1901 words · 张玉新 Yuxin Zhang · 0

ASIL E Is Not the Point. The No-Human-Fallback Safety Case Is.

Abstract: ASIL E is not a published standard. Its real value is not the name of a higher integrity level, but the question it forces Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous-driving safety arguments to answer: when there is no human fallback, can the safety case still credit a human controller? For me, the useful translation is not “ASIL E compliance.” It is a no-human-fallback review lens, four evidence fields in ADSafetyPilot, and a feedback loop connecting ROAM, DRIVEResearch, and a field-monitoring-backed safety case. ...

June 3, 2026 · 12 min · 2475 words · 张玉新 Yuxin Zhang · 0

Robots Need SOTIF Too

Abstract: On June 2, 2026, the Chinese national standard project 机器人预期功能安全实施指南 entered public notice, with the comment period scheduled to close on July 2, 2026. I have put this direction into OpenTopic as the second open research theme: Robot SOTIF. The goal is not to copy autonomous-driving SOTIF directly into robotics, but to build an evidence chain from standards, ODD, scenarios, triggering conditions, physical interaction, LLM/VLA decision safety, and finally to a defensible safety case. ...

June 3, 2026 · 7 min · 1393 words · 张玉新 Yuxin Zhang · 0

Harness Engineering: User Experience vs Safety Compliance — A Direction Mainstream Roadmaps Have Collectively Skipped

Abstract: In Q1 2026, “Harness Engineering” surfaced almost simultaneously at OpenAI, Anthropic, and the Chinese startup Nextie, and the “12 Primitives” converged in the open-source community as a shared taxonomy. This essay argues that essentially all mainstream investment in Harness has concentrated in a single dimension — user experience, performance, efficiency — while the dimension that actually determines market access in Safety-Critical domains (autonomous driving, medical AI, financial risk control) has been collectively skipped: safety compliance. By constructing a two-way mapping between the 12 Harness Primitives and SOTIF (ISO 21448), this essay identifies 12 concrete research directions, offered as a starting point for standardization bodies, corporate R&D, third-party institutions, and academic labs to jointly fill in this commons. A ~3000-word Chinese short form is available on the author’s WeChat channel. ...

April 19, 2026 · 24 min · 4944 words · 张玉新 Yuxin Zhang · 0

Applying Harness Engineering to Intelligent Driving

Abstract: In early 2026, Harness Engineering rose quickly in the AI engineering community, becoming a third-generation methodology after Prompt Engineering and Context Engineering. Starting from the core concept of Harness Engineering, this article systematically analyzes its deep correspondence with today’s end-to-end intelligent-driving systems across the full lifecycle. It argues that the two fields are structurally isomorphic in their control-theoretic framework, improvement loops, and philosophy of failure response. It also discusses the reference value of Harness Engineering for intelligent-driving user experience and safety engineering, especially SOTIF / ISO 21448. The central finding is that Harness Engineering and automotive safety engineering are not superficially similar metaphors. They are two independently evolved solutions to the same class of root problems, sharing the same underlying operating system. ...

April 9, 2026 · 26 min · 5373 words · Yuxin Zhang · 0