Efficient Verification of Neural Networks Against LVM-Based Specifications

Abstract

The deployment of perception systems based on neural networks in safety critical applications requires assurance on their robustness. Deterministic guarantees on network robustness require formal verification. Standard approaches for verifying robustness analyse invariance to analytically defined transformations, but not the diverse and ubiquitous changes involving object pose, scene viewpoint, occlusions, etc. To this end, we present an efficient approach for verifying specifications definable using Latent Variable Models that capture such diverse changes. The approach involves adding an invertible encoding head to the network to be verified, enabling the verification of latent space sets with minimal reconstruction overhead. We report verification experiments for three classes of proposed latent space specifications, each capturing different types of realistic input variations. Differently from previous work in this area, the proposed approach is relatively independent of input dimensionality and scales to a broad class of deep networks and real-world datasets by mitigating the inefficiency and decoder expressivity dependence in the present state-of-the-art.