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The use of machine learning (ML) in airborne safety-critical systems requires new methods for certification, as the current standards and practices were defined and refined over decades with classical programming in mind and do not support this new development paradigm. This article provides an overview of the main challenges to the demonstration of compliance with regulation requirements raised by the use of ML and focuses on one particular case where the formal verification may become mandatory in future regulations, which is the verification of (partial) monotony properties. For this case, we propose a method to evaluate the monotony property using mixed integer linear programming. Contrary to the existing literature, our analysis provides a lower and upper bound of the space volume where the property does not hold, that we denote “Non-Monotonic Space Coverage”. This work has several advantages: (i) our formulation of the monotony property works on discrete inputs, (ii) the iterative nature of our algorithm allows for refining the analysis as needed, and (iii) from an industrial point of view, the results of this evaluation are valuable for the aeronautical domain, where it can support the certification demonstration. We applied this method to an avionic case study (braking distance estimation using a neural network) where the verification of the monotony property is of paramount interest from a safety perspective.

Safety-critical applications are required to perform as expected in normal operations. Image processing functions are often required to be insensitive to small geometric perturbations such as rotation, scaling, shearing or translation. This paper addresses the formal verification of neural networks against geometric perturbations on their image dataset. Our method Super-DeepG improves the reasoning used in linear relaxation techniques and Lipschitz optimization, and provides an implementation that leverages GPU hardware. By doing so, Super-DeepG achieves both precision and computational efficiency of robustness certification, to an extent that outperforms prior work. Super-DeepG is shared as an open-source tool on GitHub.

We introduce a novel Interval Bound Propagation (IBP) approach for the formal verification of object detection models, specifically targeting the Intersection over Union (IoU) metric. The approach has been implemented in an open source code, named IBP IoU, compatible with popular abstract interpretation based verification tools. The resulting verifier is evaluated on landing approach runway detection and handwritten digit recognition case studies. Comparisons against a baseline (Vanilla IBP IoU) highlight the superior performance of IBP IoU in ensuring accuracy and stability, contributing to more secure and robust machine learning applications.

We introduce a novel Interval Bound Propagation (IBP) approach for the formal verification of object detection models, specifically targeting the Intersection over Union (IoU) metric. The approach has been implemented in an open source code, named IBP IoU, compatible with popular abstract interpretation based verification tools. The resulting verifier is evaluated on landing approach runway detection and handwritten digit recognition case studies. Comparisons against a baseline (Vanilla IBP IoU) highlight the superior performance of IBP IoU in ensuring accuracy and stability, contributing to more secure and robust machine learning applications.

Advances in machine learning (ML) open the way to innovating functions in the avionic domain, such as navigation/surveillance assistance (e.g. vision-based navigation, obstacle sensing, virtual sensing), speechto-text applications, autonomous flight, predictive maintenance or cockpit assistance. Current certification standards and practices, which were defined and refined decades over decades with classical programming in mind, do not however support this new development paradigm. This article provides an overview of the main challenges raised by the use ML in the demonstration of compliance with regulation requirements, and a survey of literature relevant to these challenges, with particular focus on the issues of robustness and explainability of ML results.

This paper focuses on a Vision-based Landing task and presents the design and the validation of a dataset that would comply with the Operational Design Domain (ODD) of a Machine-Learning (ML) system. Relying on emerging certification standards, we describe the process for establishing ODDs at both the system and image levels. In the process, we present the translation of high-level system constraints into actionable image-level properties, allowing for the definition of verifiable Data Quality Requirements (DQRs). To illustrate this approach, we use the Landing Approach Runway Detection (LARD) dataset which combines synthetic imagery and real footage, and we focus on the steps required to verify the DQRs. The replicable framework presented in this paper addresses the challenges of designing a dataset compliant with the stringent needs of ML-based systems certification in safety-critical applications.

Machine Learning (ML) seems to be one of the most promising solution to automate partially or completely some of the complex tasks currently realized by humans, such as driving vehicles, recognizing voice, etc. It is also an opportunity to implement and embed new capabilities out of the reach of classical implementation techniques. However, ML techniques introduce new potential risks. Therefore, they have only been applied in systems where their benefits are considered worth the increase of risk. In practice, ML techniques raise multiple challenges that could prevent their use in systems submitted to certification constraints. But what are the actual challenges? Can they be overcome by selecting appropriate ML techniques, or by adopting new engineering or certification practices? These are some of the questions addressed by the ML Certification 3 Workgroup (WG) set-up by the Institut de Recherche Technologique Saint Exupéry de Toulouse (IRT), as part of the DEEL Project.