학술논문

Exact and Cost-Effective Automated Transformation of Neural Network Controllers to Decision Tree Controllers
Document Type
Conference
Source
2023 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) Decision and Control (CDC), 2023 62nd IEEE Conference on. :7843-7848 Dec, 2023
Subject
Computing and Processing
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Robotics and Control Systems
Runtime
Decision making
Closed box
Artificial neural networks
Benchmark testing
Safety
Behavioral sciences
Language
ISSN
2576-2370
Abstract
Over the past decade, neural network (NN)-based controllers have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in a variety of decision-making tasks. However, their black-box nature and the risk of unexpected behaviors and surprising results pose a challenge to their deployment in real-world systems with strong guarantees of correctness and safety. We address these limitations by investigating the transformation of NN-based controllers into equivalent soft decision tree (SDT)-based controllers and its impact on verifiability. Differently from previous approaches, we focus on discrete-output NN controllers including rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation functions as well as argmax operations. We then devise an exact but cost-effective transformation algorithm, in that it can automatically prune redundant branches. We evaluate our approach using two benchmarks from the OpenAI Gym environment. Our results indicate that the SDT transformation can benefit formal verification, showing runtime improvements of up to 21x and 2x for MountainCar-v0 and CartPole-v1, respectively.