Certified Training with Branch-and-Bound for Lyapunov-stable Neural Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces CT-BaB, a certified training framework for Lyapunov-stable neural controllers that enhances verification efficiency and enlarges the region of attraction, demonstrated on a 2D Quadrotor system.

Contribution

It proposes a novel training method that combines branch-and-bound with certification to improve neural controller verification and stability guarantees.

Findings

Reduces verification time by over 11X on a 2D Quadrotor system.

Achieves 164X larger region of attraction compared to previous methods.

Produces verification-friendly models with stronger stability guarantees.

Abstract

We study the problem of learning verifiably Lyapunov-stable neural controllers that provably satisfy the Lyapunov asymptotic stability condition within a region-of-attraction (ROA). Unlike previous works that adopted counterexample-guided training without considering the computation of verification in training, we introduce Certified Training with Branch-and-Bound (CT-BaB), a new certified training framework that optimizes certified bounds, thereby reducing the discrepancy between training and test-time verification that also computes certified bounds. To achieve a relatively global guarantee on an entire input region-of-interest, we propose a training-time BaB technique that maintains a dynamic training dataset and adaptively splits hard input subregions into smaller ones, to tighten certified bounds and ease the training. Meanwhile, subregions created by the training-time BaB also inform test-time verification, for a more efficient training-aware verification. We demonstrate that CT-BaB yields verification-friendly models that can be more efficiently verified at test time while achieving stronger verifiable guarantees with larger ROA. On the largest output-feedback 2D Quadrotor system experimented, CT-BaB reduces verification time by over 11X relative to the previous state-of-the-art baseline using Counterexample Guided Inductive Synthesis (CEGIS), while achieving 164X larger ROA. Code is available at https://github.com/shizhouxing/CT-BaB.