Neural Barrier Certificates for Monotone Systems

Amirreza Alavi, Alireza Nadali, Majid Zamani, Saber Jafarpour

Abstract: Barrier certificates are real-valued functions used to formally verify the safety of dynamical systems. For systems with unknown dynamics, data-driven barrier certificates have been developed to guarantee safety using only a finite set of data. However, most existing methods rely on knowledge of Lipschitz bounds of the system and require a fine discretization of the state set, leading to high sample complexity. In this letter, we propose a novel data-driven framework for learning barrier certificates for unknown monotone systems. Our approach is based on a suitable embedding of barrier certificates into a higher-dimensional space. By leveraging interval analysis, this embedding enables us to establish data-driven safety certificates for monotone systems. Unlike existing methods, our framework is independent of Lipschitz continuity and quantization parameters of the state set, allowing for arbitrary state-space discretization and thereby alleviating extensive sampling requirements. To efficiently construct barrier certificates, we introduce suitable neural network architectures and train them using an appropriately designed loss function. We illustrate our approach through two case studies, demonstrating that our method successfully finds separable embedded barrier certificates while substantially reducing sample complexity compared to conventional neural barrier certificate methods, all while maintaining formal correctness guarantees.

External IDs:doi:10.1109/lcsys.2025.3579779