A Unified View of Piecewise Linear Neural Network Verification

The success of Deep Learning and its potential use in many safety-critical applications has motivated research on formal verification of Neural Network (NN) models. Despite the reputation of learned NN models to behave as black boxes and the theoretical hardness of proving their properties, researchers have been successful in verifying some classes of models by exploiting their piecewise linear structure and taking insights from formal methods such as Satisifiability Modulo Theory. These methods are however still far from scaling to realistic neural networks. To facilitate progress on this crucial area, we make two key contributions. First, we present a unified framework that encompasses previous methods. This analysis results in the identification of new methods that combine the strengths of multiple existing approaches, accomplishing a speedup of two orders of magnitude compared to the previous state of the art. Second, we propose a new data set of benchmarks which includes a collection of previously released testcases. We use the benchmark to provide the first experimental comparison of existing algorithms and identify the factors impacting the hardness of verification problems.Comment: Updated version of "Piecewise Linear Neural Network verification: A comparative study

Dissipative Stabilization of Linear Systems with Time-Varying General Distributed Delays (Complete Version)

New methods are developed for the stabilization of a linear system with general time-varying distributed delays existing at the system's states, inputs and outputs. In contrast to most existing literature where the function of time-varying delay is continuous and bounded, we assume it to be bounded and measurable. Furthermore, the distributed delay kernels can be any square-integrable function over a bounded interval, where the kernels are handled directly by using a decomposition scenario without using approximations. By constructing a Krasovski\u{i} functional via the application of a novel integral inequality, sufficient conditions for the existence of a dissipative state feedback controller are derived in terms of matrix inequalities without utilizing the existing reciprocally convex combination lemmas. The proposed synthesis (stability) conditions, which take dissipativity into account, can be either solved directly by a standard numerical solver of semidefinite programming if they are convex, or reshaped into linear matrix inequalities, or solved via a proposed iterative algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, no existing methods can handle the synthesis problem investigated in this paper. Finally, numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies.Comment: Accepted by Automatic