SaDe: Learning Models that Provably Satisfy Domain Constraints

In many real world applications of machine learning, models have to meet certain domain-based requirements that can be expressed as constraints (for example, safety-critical constraints in autonomous driving systems). Such constraints are often handled by including them in a regularization term, while learning a model. This approach, however, does not guarantee 100% satisfaction of the constraints: it only reduces violations of the constraints on the training set rather than ensuring that the predictions by the model will always adhere to them. In this paper, we present a framework for learning models that provably fulfill the constraints under all circumstances (i.e., also on unseen data). To achieve this, we cast learning as a maximum satisfiability problem, and solve it using a novel SaDe algorithm that combines constraint satisfaction with gradient descent. We compare our method against regularization based baselines on linear models and show that our method is capable of enforcing different types of domain constraints effectively on unseen data, without sacrificing predictive performance.