Formal and Practical Elements for the Certification of Machine Learning Systems

TL;DR

This paper develops a formal and practical framework for certifying safety-critical machine learning systems, addressing certification challenges in autonomous flight applications by combining theoretical guarantees with practical verification methods.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, model-agnostic certification framework that integrates formal guarantees with practical verification for machine learning in safety-critical systems.

Findings

Framework is scalable and model-agnostic

Demonstrated on autonomous vision-based landing

Provides formal and practical certification elements

Abstract

Over the past decade, machine learning has demonstrated impressive results, often surpassing human capabilities in sensing tasks relevant to autonomous flight. Unlike traditional aerospace software, the parameters of machine learning models are not hand-coded nor derived from physics but learned from data. They are automatically adjusted during a training phase, and their values do not usually correspond to physical requirements. As a result, requirements cannot be directly traced to lines of code, hindering the current bottom-up aerospace certification paradigm. This paper attempts to address this gap by 1) demystifying the inner workings and processes to build machine learning models, 2) formally establishing theoretical guarantees given by those processes, and 3) complementing these formal elements with practical considerations to develop a complete certification argument for safety-critical machine learning systems. Based on a scalable statistical verifier, our proposed framework is model-agnostic and tool-independent, making it adaptable to many use cases in the industry. We demonstrate results on a widespread application in autonomous flight: vision-based landing.