skip to main content


Title: Verification-guided Programmatic Controller Synthesis
We present a verification-based learning framework VEL that synthesizes safe programmatic controllers for environments with continuous state and action spaces. The key idea is the integration of program reasoning techniques into controller training loops. VEL performs abstraction-based program verification to reason about a programmatic controller and its environment as a closed-loop system. Based on a novel verification-guided synthesis loop for training, VEL minimizes the amount of safety violation in the proof space of the system, which approximates the worst-case safety loss, using gradient-descent style optimization. Experimental results demonstrate the substantial benefits of leveraging verification feedback for synthesizing provably correct controllers.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2007799 2124155
PAR ID:
10417327
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems. TACAS 2023. LNCS
Volume:
13994
Page Range / eLocation ID:
229–250
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. We present an approach for the synthesis and verification of neural network controllers for closed loop dynamical systems, modelled as an ordinary differential equation. Feedforward neural networks are ubiquitous when it comes to approximating functions, especially in the machine learning literature. The proposed verification technique tries to construct an over-approximation of the system trajectories using a combination of tools, such as, Sherlock and Flow*. In addition to computing reach sets, we incorporate counter examples or bad traces into the synthesis phase of the controller as well. We go back and forth between verification and counter example generation until the system outputs a fully verified controller, or the training fails to terminate in a neural network which is compliant with the desired specifications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over a suite of benchmarks ranging from 2 to 17 variables. 
    more » « less
  2. Machine learning driven image-based controllers allow robotic systems to take intelligent actions based on the visual feedback from their environment. Understanding when these controllers might lead to system safety violations is important for their integration in safety-critical applications and engineering corrective safety measures for the system. Existing methods leverage simulation-based testing (or falsification) to find the failures of vision-based controllers, i.e., the visual inputs that lead to closed-loop safety violations. However, these techniques do not scale well to the scenarios involving high-dimensional and complex visual inputs, such as RGB images. In this work, we cast the problem of finding closed-loop vision failures as a Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability problem. Our approach blends simulation-based analysis with HJ reachability methods to compute an approximation of the backward reachable tube (BRT) of the system, i.e., the set of unsafe states for the system under vision-based controllers. Utilizing the BRT, we can tractably and systematically find the system states and corresponding visual inputs that lead to closed-loop failures. These visual inputs can be subsequently analyzed to find the input characteristics that might have caused the failure. Besides its scalability to high-dimensional visual inputs, an explicit computation of BRT allows the proposed approach to capture non-trivial system failures that are difficult to expose via random simulations. We demonstrate our framework on two case studies involving an RGB image-based neural network controller for (a) autonomous indoor navigation, and (b) autonomous aircraft taxiing. 
    more » « less
  3. This paper presents Verisig, a hybrid system approach to verifying safety properties of closed-loop systems using neural networks as controllers. We focus on sigmoid-based networks and exploit the fact that the sigmoid is the solution to a quadratic differential equation, which allows us to transform the neural network into an equivalent hybrid system. By composing the network's hybrid system with the plant's, we transform the problem into a hybrid system verification problem which can be solved using state-of-the-art reachability tools. We show that reachability is decidable for networks with one hidden layer and decidable for general networks if Schanuel's conjecture is true. We evaluate the applicability and scalability of Verisig in two case studies, one from reinforcement learning and one in which the neural network is used to approximate a model predictive controller. 
    more » « less
  4. This paper aims to enhance the computational efficiency of safety verification of neural network control systems by developing a guaranteed neural network model reduction method. First, a concept of model reduction precision is proposed to describe the guaranteed distance between the outputs of a neural network and its reduced-size version. A reachability-based algorithm is proposed to accurately compute the model reduction precision. Then, by substituting a reduced-size neural network controller into the closed-loop system, an algorithm to compute the reachable set of the original system is developed, which is able to support much more computationally efficient safety verification processes. Finally, the developed methods are applied to a case study of the Adaptive Cruise Control system with a neural network controller, which is shown to significantly reduce the computational time of safety verification and thus validate the effectiveness of the method. 
    more » « less
  5. Neural networks are powerful tools. Applying them in computer systems—operating systems, databases, and networked systems—attracts much attention. However, neural networks are complicated black boxes that may produce unexpected results. To train networks with well-defined behaviors, we introduce ouroboros, a system that constructs verified neural networks. Verified neural networks are those that satisfy user-defined safety properties, known as specifications. Ouroboros builds verified networks by a training-verification loop that combines deep learning training and neural network verification. The system employs multiple techniques to fill the gap between today’s verification and the properties required for systems. Ouroboros also accelerates the training-verification loop by spec-aware learning. Our experiments show that ouroboros can train verified networks for five applications that we study and has a 2.8× speedup on average compared with the vanilla training-verification loop. 
    more » « less