Learning to Test: Latent Representation Learning for Dynamic Instability Detection

Abstract

Stability assessment is central to safety-critical systems governed by differential-algebraic equations (DAEs), whose dynamics are constrained by physical laws and admissibility conditions. These systems operate under stochastically varying environmental inputs, so stability must be reassessed as the context distribution shifts, yet repeated large-scale DAE simulation is prohibitive in high-dimensional or real-time settings. We propose a test-oriented learning framework that tests a trajectory-level chance constraint from deployment contexts alone. Rather than re-estimating physical parameters or re-solving the DAE, we learn a latent representation from baseline context-trajectory data that retains stability-relevant information and is regularized toward a tractable reference distribution, and calibrate a latent discrepancy test over the composite safety null. We establish exact validity for oracle calibration and asymptotic validity for its empirical implementation under class-conditional latent invariance, and show that the guarantee degrades gracefully when this invariance holds only approximately. On simulated dynamical systems and a power-system real-world example, our approach strikes a balance between validity and power, whereas other baseline methods each fail in at least one regime. An ablation that injects controlled violations of the invariance assumption shows that decisions stay correct while the violation is below the safety margin, as the theory predicts.