Formal Verification Techniques for Vision-Based Autonomous Systems - A Survey

Sayan Mitra, Corina S. Pasareanu, Pavithra Prabhakar, Sanjit A. Seshia, Ravi Mangal, Yangge Li, Christopher Watson, Divya Gopinath, Huafeng Yu

Abstract: Providing safety guarantees for autonomous systems is difficult as these systems operate in complex environments that require the use of learning-enabled components, such as deep neural networks (DNNs), for visual perception. DNNs are hard to formally verify due to their size (they can have billions of parameters), lack of formal specifications, and sensitivity to slight changes in the surrounding environment. Furthermore, the high-dimensional inputs to the DNNs come from sensors such as high-fidelity cameras that are themselves complex and hard to model – they bear complex relationships to the system states and are subject to random environmental perturbations. We present a survey of verification techniques that aim to provide quantitative or qualitative formal guarantees for such autonomous systems.