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Multi-agent applications have recently gained significant popularity. In many computer vision tasks, a network of agents, such as a team of robots with cameras, could work collaboratively to perceive the environment for efficient and accurate situation awareness. However, these agents often have limited computation, communication, and storage resources. Thus, reducing resource consumption while still providing an accurate perception of the environment becomes an important goal when deploying multi-agent systems. To achieve this goal, we identify and leverage the overlap among different camera views in multi-agent systems for reducing the processing, transmission and storage of redundant/unimportant video frames. Specifically, we have developed two collaborative multi-agent video fast-forwarding frameworks in distributed and centralized settings, respectively. In these frameworks, each individual agent can selectively process or skip video frames at adjustable paces based on multiple strategies via reinforcement learning. Multiple agents then collaboratively sense the environment via either 1) a consensus-based distributed framework called DMVF that periodically updates the fast-forwarding strategies of agents by establishing communication and consensus among connected neighbors, or 2) a centralized framework called MFFNet that utilizes a central controller to decide the fast-forwarding strategies for agents based on collected data. We demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our proposed frameworks on a real-world surveillance video dataset VideoWeb and a new simulated driving dataset CarlaSim, through extensive simulations and deployment on an embedded platform with TCP communication. We show that compared with other approaches in the literature, our frameworks achieve better coverage of important frames, while significantly reducing the number of frames processed at each agent., Comment: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2023. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2008.04437

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.

It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular safe RL methods such as those based on the Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) paradigm formulate safety violations in a cost function and try to constrain the expectation of cumulative cost under a threshold. However, it is often difficult to effectively capture and enforce hard reachability-based safety constraints indirectly with such constraints on safety violation costs. In this work, we leverage the notion of barrier function to explicitly encode the hard safety constraints, and given that the environment is unknown, relax them to our design of \emph{generative-model-based soft barrier functions}. Based on such soft barriers, we propose a safe RL approach that can jointly learn the environment and optimize the control policy, while effectively avoiding unsafe regions with safety probability optimization. Experiments on a set of examples demonstrate that our approach can effectively enforce hard safety constraints and significantly outperform CMDP-based baseline methods in system safe rate measured via simulations., Comment: Accepted to ICML 2023

With the increment of interest in leveraging machine learning technology in safety-critical systems, the robustness of neural networks under external disturbance receives more and more concerns. Global robustness is a robustness property defined on the entire input domain. And a certified globally robust network can ensure its robustness on any possible network input. However, the state-of-the-art global robustness certification algorithm can only certify networks with at most several thousand neurons. In this paper, we propose the GPU-supported global robustness certification framework GROCET, which is more efficient than the previous optimization-based certification approach. Moreover, GROCET provides differentiable global robustness, which is leveraged in the training of globally robust neural networks.

The robustness of deep neural networks has received significant interest recently, especially when being deployed in safety-critical systems, as it is important to analyze how sensitive the model output is under input perturbations. While most previous works focused on the local robustness property around an input sample, the studies of the global robustness property, which bounds the maximum output change under perturbations over the entire input space, are still lacking. In this work, we formulate the global robustness certification for neural networks with ReLU activation functions as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem, and present an efficient approach to address it. Our approach includes a novel interleaving twin-network encoding scheme, where two copies of the neural network are encoded side-by-side with extra interleaving dependencies added between them, and an over-approximation algorithm leveraging relaxation and refinement techniques to reduce complexity. Experiments demonstrate the timing efficiency of our work when compared with previous global robustness certification methods and the tightness of our over-approximation. A case study of closed-loop control safety verification is conducted, and demonstrates the importance and practicality of our approach for certifying the global robustness of neural networks in safety-critical systems., Comment: Published at DATE 2022

In model-based reinforcement learning for safety-critical control systems, it is important to formally certify system properties (e.g., safety, stability) under the learned controller. However, as existing methods typically apply formal verification \emph{after} the controller has been learned, it is sometimes difficult to obtain any certificate, even after many iterations between learning and verification. To address this challenge, we propose a framework that jointly conducts reinforcement learning and formal verification by formulating and solving a novel bilevel optimization problem, which is differentiable by the gradients from the value function and certificates. Experiments on a variety of examples demonstrate the significant advantages of our framework over the model-based stochastic value gradient (SVG) method and the model-free proximal policy optimization (PPO) method in finding feasible controllers with barrier functions and Lyapunov functions that ensure system safety and stability., Comment: This paper is accepted to International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems

We present POLAR, a polynomial arithmetic-based framework for efficient bounded-time reachability analysis of neural-network controlled systems (NNCSs). Existing approaches that leverage the standard Taylor Model (TM) arithmetic for approximating the neural-network controller cannot deal with non-differentiable activation functions and suffer from rapid explosion of the remainder when propagating the TMs. POLAR overcomes these shortcomings by integrating TM arithmetic with \textbf{Bernstein B{\'e}zier Form} and \textbf{symbolic remainder}. The former enables TM propagation across non-differentiable activation functions and local refinement of TMs, and the latter reduces error accumulation in the TM remainder for linear mappings in the network. Experimental results show that POLAR significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art tools in terms of both efficiency and tightness of the reachable set overapproximation. The source code can be found in https://github.com/ChaoHuang2018/POLAR_Tool, Comment: Accepted by ATVA 2022

In the current control design of safety-critical autonomous systems, formal verification techniques are typically applied after the controller is designed to evaluate whether the required properties (e.g., safety) are satisfied. However, due to the increasing system complexity and the fundamental hardness of designing a controller with formal guarantees, such an open-loop process of design-then-verify often results in many iterations and fails to provide the necessary guarantees. In this paper, we propose a correct-by-construction control learning framework that integrates the verification into the control design process in a closed-loop manner, i.e., design-while-verify. Specifically, we leverage the verification results (computed reachable set of the system state) to construct feedback metrics for control learning, which measure how likely the current design of control parameters can meet the required reach-avoid property for safety and goal-reaching. We formulate an optimization problem based on such metrics for tuning the controller parameters, and develop an approximated gradient descent algorithm with a difference method to solve the optimization problem and learn the controller. The learned controller is formally guaranteed to meet the required reach-avoid property. By treating verifiability as a first-class objective and effectively leveraging the verification results during the control learning process, our approach can significantly improve the chance of finding a control design with formal property guarantees. This is demonstrated via a set of experiments on both linear and non-linear systems that use model-based or neural network based controllers., Comment: Under review

Neural networks are being increasingly applied to control and decision-making for learning-enabled cyber-physical systems (LE-CPSs). They have shown promising performance without requiring the development of complex physical models; however, their adoption is significantly hindered by the concerns on their safety, robustness, and efficiency. In this work, we propose COCKTAIL, a novel design framework that automatically learns a neural network-based controller from multiple existing control methods (experts) that could be either model-based or neural network-based. In particular, COCKTAIL first performs reinforcement learning to learn an optimal system-level adaptive mixing strategy that incorporates the underlying experts with dynamically-assigned weights and then conducts a teacher-student distillation with probabilistic adversarial training and regularization to synthesize a student neural network controller with improved control robustness (measured by a safe control rate metric with respect to adversarial attacks or measurement noises), control energy efficiency, and verifiability (measured by the computation time for verification). Experiments on three non-linear systems demonstrate significant advantages of our approach on these properties over various baseline methods., Comment: The paper has been accepted by Design Automation Conference 2021

Many safety-critical real-time systems operate under harsh environment and are subject to soft errors caused by transient or intermittent faults. It is critical and yet often very challenging to apply fault tolerance techniques in these systems, due to their resource limitations and stringent constraints on timing and functionality. In this work, we leverage the concept of weakly-hard constraints, which allows task deadline misses in a bounded manner, to improve system's capability to accommodate fault tolerance techniques while ensuring timing and functional correctness. In particular, we 1) quantitatively measure control cost under different deadline hit/miss scenarios and identify weak-hard constraints that guarantee control stability, 2) employ typical worst-case analysis (TWCA) to bound the number of deadline misses and approximate system control cost, 3) develop an event-based simulation method to check the task execution pattern and evaluate system control cost for any given solution and 4) develop a meta-heuristic algorithm that consists of heuristic methods and a simulated annealing procedure to explore the design space. Our experiments on an industrial case study and a set of synthetic examples demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach., Comment: ICCAD 2020

In many intelligent systems, a network of agents collaboratively perceives the environment for better and more efficient situation awareness. As these agents often have limited resources, it could be greatly beneficial to identify the content overlapping among camera views from different agents and leverage it for reducing the processing, transmission and storage of redundant/unimportant video frames. This paper presents a consensus-based distributed multi-agent video fast-forwarding framework, named DMVF, that fast-forwards multi-view video streams collaboratively and adaptively. In our framework, each camera view is addressed by a reinforcement learning based fast-forwarding agent, which periodically chooses from multiple strategies to selectively process video frames and transmits the selected frames at adjustable paces. During every adaptation period, each agent communicates with a number of neighboring agents, evaluates the importance of the selected frames from itself and those from its neighbors, refines such evaluation together with other agents via a system-wide consensus algorithm, and uses such evaluation to decide their strategy for the next period. Compared with approaches in the literature on a real-world surveillance video dataset VideoWeb, our method significantly improves the coverage of important frames and also reduces the number of frames processed in the system., Comment: To appear at ACM Multimedia 2020

With growing system complexity and closer cyber-physical interaction, there are increasingly stronger dependencies between different function and architecture layers in automotive systems. This paper first introduces several cross-layer approaches we developed in the past for holistically addressing multiple system layers in the design of individual vehicles and of connected vehicle applications; and then presents a new methodology based on the weakly-hard paradigm for leveraging the scheduling flexibility in architecture layer to improve the system performance at function layer. The results of these works demonstrate the importance and effectiveness of cross-layer design for automotive systems.

Control schemes for autonomous systems are often designed in a way that anticipates the worst case in any situation. At runtime, however, there could exist opportunities to leverage the characteristics of specific environment and operation context for more efficient control. In this work, we develop an online intermittent-control framework that combines formal verification with model-based optimization and deep reinforcement learning to opportunistically skip certain control computation and actuation to save actuation energy and computational resources without compromising system safety. Experiments on an adaptive cruise control system demonstrate that our approach can achieve significant energy and computation savings., Comment: Accepted by Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2020

Gravitational waves from coalescences of neutron stars or stellar-mass black holes into intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) of $\gtrsim 100$ solar masses represent one of the exciting possible sources for advanced gravitational-wave detectors. These sources can provide definitive evidence for the existence of IMBHs, probe globular-cluster dynamics, and potentially serve as tests of general relativity. We analyse the accuracy with which we can measure the masses and spins of the IMBH and its companion in intermediate-mass ratio coalescences. We find that we can identify an IMBH with a mass above $100 ~ M_\odot$ with $95\%$ confidence provided the massive body exceeds $130 ~ M_\odot$. For source masses above $\sim200 ~ M_\odot$, the best measured parameter is the frequency of the quasi-normal ringdown. Consequently, the total mass is measured better than the chirp mass for massive binaries, but the total mass is still partly degenerate with spin, which cannot be accurately measured. Low-frequency detector sensitivity is particularly important for massive sources, since sensitivity to the inspiral phase is critical for measuring the mass of the stellar-mass companion. We show that we can accurately infer source parameters for cosmologically redshifted signals by applying appropriate corrections. We investigate the impact of uncertainty in the model gravitational waveforms and conclude that our main results are likely robust to systematics., Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures