Transformer-Enhanced Data-Driven Output Reachability with Conformal Coverage Guarantees
Abstract
This paper considers output reachability analysis for linear time-invariant systems with unknown state-space matrices and unknown observation map, given only noisy input-output measurements. The Cayley--Hamilton theorem is applied to eliminate the latent state algebraically, producing an autoregressive input-output model whose parameter uncertainty is enclosed in a matrix zonotope. Set-valued propagation of this model yields output reachable sets with deterministic containment guarantees under a bounded aggregated residual assumption. The conservatism inherent in the lifted matrix-zonotope product is then mitigated by a decoder-only Transformer trained on labels obtained through directional contraction of the formal envelope via an exterior non-reachability certificate. Split conformal prediction restores distribution-free coverage at both per-step and trajectory levels without access to the true reachable-set hull. The framework is validated on a five-dimensional system with multiple unknown observation matrices.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.02173,
title = {Transformer-Enhanced Data-Driven Output Reachability with Conformal Coverage Guarantees},
author = {Zhen Zhang and Peng Xie and Wenyuan Wu and Yanliang Huang and Amr Alanwar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.02173},
year = {2026}
}