General Value Functions for Remaining Useful Life and Failure-Mode Prediction

arXiv:2607.22268 · stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.AP · Submitted 2026-07-24 · Read on arXiv

Hao Yan, Ali Sarabi, Qing Zou, Boyang Xu

stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.AP

Submitted: 2026-07-24

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction and failure-mode classification are central tasks in predictive maintenance.

Terminology

Abstract

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction and failure-mode classification are central tasks in predictive maintenance. Many data-driven pipelines use fixed-window supervised learning with complete terminal labels; such routes do not naturally encode the temporal recursion linking successive degradation-state predictions when observations are partial or unit identities are unavailable. We formulate prognostics as vector General Value Function (GVF) prediction on an absorbing degradation process, treating RUL and failure-mode probabilities as temporally consistent targets rather than independent window-level labels, and estimate them with a multi-step temporal-difference estimator, TD(n, lambda). Supporting theory identifies the Bellman fixed point of the vector GVFs, characterizes the linear projected-TD limit and its relation to complete-return Monte Carlo regression under realizability, and explains when bootstrapped TD targets are less variable than Monte Carlo returns. On an event-triggered multimode simulation and NASA C-MAPSS label-scarce stitch data, TD improves RUL and failure-mode prediction relative to a supervised same-backbone Monte Carlo control, especially under scarce complete labels. Practically, fragmented, identity-free degradation records can contribute local Bellman transitions instead of being discarded until complete run-to-failure labels are available.

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