No Arabic abstract
Formal verification of neural networks (NNs) is a challenging and important problem. Existing efficient complete solvers typically require the branch-and-bound (BaB) process, which splits the problem domain into sub-domains and solves each sub-domain using faster but weaker incomplete verifiers, such as Linear Programming (LP) on linearly relaxed sub-domains. In this paper, we propose to use the backward mode linear relaxation based perturbation analysis (LiRPA) to replace LP during the BaB process, which can be efficiently implemented on the typical machine learning accelerators such as GPUs and TPUs. However, unlike LP, LiRPA when applied naively can produce much weaker bounds and even cannot check certain conflicts of sub-domains during splitting, making the entire procedure incomplete after BaB. To address these challenges, we apply a fast gradient based bound tightening procedure combined with batch splits and the design of minimal usage of LP bound procedure, enabling us to effectively use LiRPA on the accelerator hardware for the challenging complete NN verification problem and significantly outperform LP-based approaches. On a single GPU, we demonstrate an order of magnitude speedup compared to existing LP-based approaches.
Recent works in neural network verification show that cheap incomplete verifiers such as CROWN, based upon bound propagations, can effectively be used in Branch-and-Bound (BaB) methods to accelerate complete verification, achieving significant speedups compared to expensive linear programming (LP) based techniques. However, they cannot fully handle the per-neuron split constraints introduced by BaB like LP verifiers do, leading to looser bounds and hurting their verification efficiency. In this work, we develop $beta$-CROWN, a new bound propagation based method that can fully encode per-neuron splits via optimizable parameters $beta$. When the optimizable parameters are jointly optimized in intermediate layers, $beta$-CROWN has the potential of producing better bounds than typical LP verifiers with neuron split constraints, while being efficiently parallelizable on GPUs. Applied to the complete verification setting, $beta$-CROWN is close to three orders of magnitude faster than LP-based BaB methods for robustness verification, and also over twice faster than state-of-the-art GPU-based complete verifiers with similar timeout rates. By terminating BaB early, our method can also be used for incomplete verification. Compared to the state-of-the-art semidefinite-programming (SDP) based verifier, we show a substantial leap forward by greatly reducing the gap between verified accuracy and empirical adversarial attack accuracy, from 35% (SDP) to 12% on an adversarially trained MNIST network ($epsilon=0.3$), while being 47 times faster. Our code is available at https://github.com/KaidiXu/Beta-CROWN
Neural networks are one of the disruptive computing concepts of our time. However, they fundamentally differ from classical, algorithmic computing in a number of fundamental aspects. These differences result in equally fundamental, severe and relevant challenges for neural network computing using current computing substrates. Neural networks urge for parallelism across the entire processor and for a co-location of memory and arithmetic, i.e. beyond von Neumann architectures. Parallelism in particular made photonics a highly promising platform, yet until now scalable and integratable concepts are scarce. Here, we demonstrate for the first time how a fully parallel and fully implemented photonic neural network can be realized using spatially distributed modes of an efficient and fast semiconductor laser. Importantly, all neural network connections are realized in hardware, and our processor produces results without pre- or post-processing. 130+ nodes are implemented in a large-area vertical cavity surface emitting laser, input and output weights are realized via the complex transmission matrix of a multimode fiber and a digital micro-mirror array, respectively. We train the readout weights to perform 2-bit header recognition, a 2-bit XOR and 2-bit digital analog conversion, and obtain < 0.9 10^-3 and 2.9 10^-2 error rates for digit recognition and XOR, respectively. Finally, the digital analog conversion can be realized with a standard deviation of only 5.4 10^-2. Our system is scalable to much larger sizes and to bandwidths in excess of 20 GHz.
Machine-intelligence has become a driving factor in modern society. However, its demand outpaces the underlying electronic technology due to limitations given by fundamental physics such as capacitive charging of wires, but also by system architecture of storing and handling data, both driving recent trends towards processor heterogeneity. Here we introduce a novel amplitude-only Fourier-optical processor paradigm capable of processing large-scale ~(1,000 x 1,000) matrices in a single time-step and 100 microsecond-short latency. Conceptually, the information-flow direction is orthogonal to the two-dimensional programmable-network, which leverages 10^6-parallel channels of display technology, and enables a prototype demonstration performing convolutions as pixel-wise multiplications in the Fourier domain reaching peta operations per second throughputs. The required real-to-Fourier domain transformations are performed passively by optical lenses at zero-static power. We exemplary realize a convolutional neural network (CNN) performing classification tasks on 2-Megapixel large matrices at 10 kHz rates, which latency-outperforms current GPU and phase-based display technology by one and two orders of magnitude, respectively. Training this optical convolutional layer on image classification tasks and utilizing it in a hybrid optical-electronic CNN, shows classification accuracy of 98% (MNIST) and 54% (CIFAR-10). Interestingly, the amplitude-only CNN is inherently robust against coherence noise in contrast to phase-based paradigms and features an over 2 orders of magnitude lower delay than liquid crystal-based systems. Beyond contributing to novel accelerator technology, scientifically this amplitude-only massively-parallel optical compute-paradigm can be far-reaching as it de-validates the assumption that phase-information outweighs amplitude in optical processors for machine-intelligence.
Using logical clauses to represent patterns, Tsetlin Machines (TMs) have recently obtained competitive performance in terms of accuracy, memory footprint, energy, and learning speed on several benchmarks. Each TM clause votes for or against a particular class, with classification resolved using a majority vote. While the evaluation of clauses is fast, being based on binary operators, the voting makes it necessary to synchronize the clause evaluation, impeding parallelization. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for desynchronizing the evaluation of clauses, eliminating the voting bottleneck. In brief, every clause runs in its own thread for massive native parallelism. For each training example, we keep track of the class votes obtained from the clauses in local voting tallies. The local voting tallies allow us to detach the processing of each clause from the rest of the clauses, supporting decentralized learning. This means that the TM most of the time will operate on outdated voting tallies. We evaluated the proposed parallelization across diverse learning tasks and it turns out that our decentralized TM learning algorithm copes well with working on outdated data, resulting in no significant loss in learning accuracy. Furthermore, we show that the proposed approach provides up to 50 times faster learning. Finally, learning time is almost constant for reasonable clause amounts (employing from 20 to 7,000 clauses on a Tesla V100 GPU). For sufficiently large clause numbers, computation time increases approximately proportionally. Our parallel and asynchronous architecture thus allows processing of massive datasets and operating with more clauses for higher accuracy.
This survey presents an overview of verification techniques for autonomous systems, with a focus on safety-critical autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) and subcomponents thereof. Autonomy in CPS is enabling by recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) through approaches such as deep neural networks (DNNs), embedded in so-called learning enabled components (LECs) that accomplish tasks from classification to control. Recently, the formal methods and formal verification community has developed methods to characterize behaviors in these LECs with eventual goals of formally verifying specifications for LECs, and this article presents a survey of many of these recent approaches.