Compositional Neural Network Verification via Assume-Guarantee Reasoning

Verifying the behavior of neural networks is necessary if developersare to confidently deploy them as parts of mission-critical systems. Toward this end, researchers have been actively developing a range of increasingly sophisticated and scalable neural network verifiers.

However, scaling verification to large networks is challenging, at least in part due to the significant memory requirements of verification algorithms.

In this paper, we propose an assume-guarantee compositional framework, CoVeNN, that is parameterized by an underlying verifier to generate a sequence of verification sub-problems to address this challenge. We present an iterative refinement-based strategy for computing assumptionsthat allow sub-problems to retain sufficient accuracy.

An evaluation using 7 neural networks and a total of 140 property specifications demonstrates that CoVeNN can verify nearly 7 times more problems than state-of-the-art verifiers. CoVeNN is part of the NeuralSAT verification project: https://github.com/dynaroars/neuralsat.