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Most Influential UAI 2020 Paper · 2026-03 edition

Probabilistic Safety For Bayesian Neural Networks

Matthew Wicker; Luca Laurenti; Andrea Patane; Marta Kwiatkowska

Venue
Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2020
Recognition
Most Influential UAI 2020 Paper (Rank No. 11)
Edition
2026-03
Impact factor
3
Certificate ID
00683c3a1efff768

Abstract

We study probabilistic safety for Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) under adversarial input perturbations. Given a compact set of input points, $T \subseteq R^m$, we study the probability w.r.t. the BNN posterior that all the points in $T$ are mapped to the same region $S$ in the output space. In particular, this can be used to evaluate the probability that a network sampled from the BNN is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We rely on relaxation techniques from non-convex optimization to develop a method for computing a lower bound on probabilistic safety for BNNs, deriving explicit procedures for the case of interval and linear function propagation techniques. We apply our methods to BNNs trained on a regression task, airborne collision avoidance, and MNIST, empirically showing that our approach allows one to certify probabilistic safety of BNNs with millions of parameters.

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