POLAR-Express: Efficient and Precise Formal Reachability Analysis of Neural-Network Controlled Systems

Abstract: Neural networks (NNs) playing the role of controllers have demonstrated impressive empirical performances on challenging control problems. However, the potential adoption of NN controllers in real-life applications also gives rise to a growing concern over the safety of these neural-network controlled systems (NNCSs), especially when used in safety-critical applications. In this work, we present POLAR-Express, an efficient and precise formal reachability analysis tool for verifying the safety of NNCSs. POLAR-Express uses Taylor model arithmetic to propagate Taylor models (TMs) across a neural network layer-by-layer to compute an overapproximation of the neural-network function. It can be applied to analyze any feed-forward neural network with continuous activation functions. We also present a novel approach to propagate TMs more efficiently and precisely across ReLU activation functions. In addition, POLAR-Express provides parallel computation support for the layer-by-layer propagation of TMs, thus significantly improving the efficiency and scalability over its earlier prototype POLAR. Across the comparison with six other state-of-the-art tools on a diverse set of benchmarks, POLAR-Express achieves the best verification efficiency and tightness in the reachable set analysis.