Taming Reachability Analysis of DNN-Controlled Systems via Abstraction-Based Training

The intrinsic complexity of deep neural networks (DNNs) makes it challenging to verify not only the networks themselves but also the hosting DNN-controlled systems. Reachability analysis of these systems faces the same challenge. Existing approaches rely on overapproximating DNNs using simpler polynomial models. However, they suffer from low efficiency and large overestimation, and are restricted to specific types of DNNs. This paper presents a novel abstraction-based approach to bypass the crux of over-approximating DNNs in reachability analysis. Specifically, we extend conventional DNNs by inserting an additional abstraction layer, which abstracts a real number to an interval for training. The inserted abstraction layer ensures that the values represented by an interval are indistinguishable to the network for both training and decision-making. Leveraging this, we devise the first blackbox reachability analysis approach for DNN-controlled systems, where trained DNNs are only queried as black-box oracles for the actions on abstract states. Our approach is sound, tight, efficient, and agnostic to any DNN type and size. The experimental results on a wide range of benchmarks show that the DNNs trained by using our approach exhibit comparable performance, while the reachability analysis of the corresponding systems becomes more amenable with significant tightness and efficiency improvement over the state-of-the-art white-box approaches.