We study the problem of certifying the robustness of Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) to adversarial input perturbations. Specifically, we define two notions of robustness for BNNs in an adversarial setting: probabilistic robustness and decision robustness. The former deals with the probabilistic behaviour of the network, that is, it ensures robustness across different stochastic realisations of the network, while the latter provides guarantees for the overall (output) decision of the BNN. Although these robustness properties cannot be computed analytically, we present a unified computational framework for efficiently and formally bounding them. Our approach is based on weight interval sampling, integration and bound propagation techniques, and can be applied to BNNs with a large number of parameters independently of the (approximate) inference method employed to train the BNN. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on tasks including airborne collision avoidance, medical imaging and autonomous driving, demonstrating that it can compute non-trivial guarantees on medium size images (i.e., over 16 thousand input parameters).

Accurate fatigue assessment of material plagued by defects is of utmost importance to guarantee safety and service continuity in engineering components. This study shows how state-of-the-art semi-empirical models can be endowed with additional defect descriptors to probabilistically predict the occurrence of fatigue failures by exploiting advanced Bayesian Physics-guided Neural Network (B-PGNN) approaches. A B-PGNN is thereby developed to predict the fatigue failure probability of a sample containing defects, referred to a given fatigue endurance limit. In this framework, a robustly calibrated El Haddad's curve is exploited as the prior physics reinforcement of the probabilistic model, i.e., prior knowledge. Following, a likelihood function is built and the B-PGNN is trained via Bayesian Inference, thus calculating the posterior of the parameters. The arbitrariness of the choice of the related architecture is circumvented through a Bayesian model selection strategy. A case-study is analysed to prove the robustness of the proposed approach. This methodology proposes an advanced practical approach to help support the probabilistic design against fatigue failure.

Model-based reinforcement learning seeks to simultaneously learn the dynamics of an unknown stochastic environment and synthesise an optimal policy for acting in it. Ensuring the safety and robustness of sequential decisions made through a policy in such an environment is a key challenge for policies intended for safety-critical scenarios. In this work, we investigate two complementary problems: first, computing reach-avoid probabilities for iterative predictions made with dynamical models, with dynamics described by Bayesian neural network (BNN); second, synthesising control policies that are optimal with respect to a given reach-avoid specification (reaching a “target” state, while avoiding a set of “unsafe” states) and a learned BNN model. Our solution leverages interval propagation and backward recursion techniques to compute lower bounds for the probability that a policy's sequence of actions leads to satisfying the reach-avoid specification. Such computed lower bounds provide safety certification for the given policy and BNN model. We then introduce control synthesis algorithms to derive policies maximizing said lower bounds on the safety probability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a series of control benchmarks characterized by learned BNN dynamics models. On our most challenging benchmark, compared to purely data-driven policies the optimal synthesis algorithm is able to provide more than a four-fold increase in the number of certifiable states and more than a three-fold increase in the average guaranteed reach-avoid probability.

Vulnerability to adversarial attacks is one of the principal hurdles to the adoption of deep learning in safety-critical applications. Despite significant efforts, both practical and theoretical, training deep learning models robust to adversarial attacks is still an open problem. In this article, we analyse the geometry of adversarial attacks in the over-parameterized limit for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). We show that, in the limit, vulnerability to gradient-based attacks arises as a result of degeneracy in the data distribution, i.e., when the data lie on a lower dimensional submanifold of the ambient space. As a direct consequence, we demonstrate that in this limit, BNN posteriors are robust to gradient-based adversarial attacks. Crucially, by relying on the convergence of infinitely-wide BNNs to Gaussian processes (GPs), we prove that, under certain relatively mild assumptions, the expected gradient of the loss with respect to the BNN posterior distribution is vanishing, even when each NN sampled from the BNN posterior does not have vanishing gradients. The experimental results on the MNIST, Fashion MNIST, and a synthetic dataset with BNNs trained with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and variational inference support this line of arguments, empirically showing that BNNs can display both high accuracy on clean data and robustness to both gradient-based and gradient-free adversarial attacks.

In this paper, we introduce BNN-DP, an efficient algorithmic framework for analysis of adversarial robustness of Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs). Given a compact set of input points T ⊂ Rⁿ, BNN-DP computes lower and upper bounds on the BNN's predictions for all the points in T. The framework is based on an interpretation of BNNs as stochastic dynamical systems, which enables the use of Dynamic Programming (DP) algorithms to bound the prediction range along the layers of the network. Specifically, the method uses bound propagation techniques and convex relaxations to derive a backward recursion procedure to over-approximate the prediction range of the BNN with piecewise affine functions. The algorithm is general and can handle both regression and classification tasks. On a set of experiments on various regression and classification tasks and BNN architectures, we show that BNN-DP outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to four orders of magnitude in both tightness of the bounds and computational efficiency.

We consider the problem of certifying the individual fairness (IF) of feed-forward neural networks (NNs). In particular, we work with the ϵ-δ-IF formulation, which, given a NN and a similarity metric learnt from data, requires that the output difference between any pair of ϵ-similar individuals is bounded by a maximum decision tolerance δ ≥ 0. Working with a range of metrics, including the Mahalanobis distance, we propose a method to over-approximate the resulting optimisation problem using piecewise-linear functions to lower and upper bound the NN's non-linearities globally over the input space. We encode this computation as the solution of a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming problem and demonstrate that it can be used to compute IF guarantees on four datasets widely used for fairness benchmarking. We show how this formulation can be used to encourage models' fairness at training time by modifying the NN loss, and empirically confirm our approach yields NNs that are orders of magnitude fairer than state-of-the-art methods.