Verifying Neural Networks with Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Formal verification can play a key role in ensuring the reliability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) deployed in safety-critical systems. Modern DNN verifiers employ a branch-and-bound framework, which alternates between branching (splitting into smaller subproblems) and bounding (pruning subproblems) to efficiently explore the verification space. However, existing branching heuristics make greedy decisions based on static scoring functions. They do not anticipate long-term efficiency or leverage the growing availability of verification data to improve performance. This work introduces RSB, a reinforcement learning framework that learns to refine baseline branching heuristics. It trains an actor-critic architecture to maximize cumulative future rewards rather than immediate scores. The actor generates attention weights from observations of raw neuron features and learned graph embeddings, which rescale baseline heuristic scores to guide neuron branching. Evaluation on 600 challenging instances demonstrates that RSB consistently outperforms state-of-the-art branching heuristics, solving 11% more instances while reducing branch exploration by 50%.