Related papers: Probabilistic Black-Box Checking via Active MDP Le…

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are trained on large amounts of unlabeled data, yet they exhibit remarkable reasoning skills. However, the trustworthiness challenges posed by these black-box models have become increasingly evident in…

We introduce the active exploration problem in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Each state of the MDP is characterized by a random value and the learner should gather samples to estimate the mean value of each state as accurately as…

Security verification of communication protocols in industrial and safety-critical systems is challenging because implementations are often proprietary, accessible only as black boxes, and too complex for manual modeling. As a result,…

Penetration Testing is a methodology for assessing network security, by generating and executing possible hacking attacks. Doing so automatically allows for regular and systematic testing. A key question is how to generate the attacks. This…

Learning-based testing (LBT) is an emerging methodology to automate iterative black-box requirements testing of software systems. The methodology involves combining model inference with model checking techniques. However, a variety of…

We consider synthesis of control policies that maximize the probability of satisfying given temporal logic specifications in unknown, stochastic environments. We model the interaction between the system and its environment as a Markov…

This paper investigates the problem of safety certification for black-box discrete-time stochastic systems, where both the system dynamics and disturbance distributions are unknown, and only sampled data are available. Under such limited…

Analysis of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) is often hindered by state space explosion. Abstraction is a well-established technique in model checking to mitigate this issue. This paper presents a novel lazy abstraction method for MDP…

The general sequential decision-making problem, which includes Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially observable MDPs (POMDPs) as special cases, aims at maximizing a cumulative reward by making a sequence of decisions based on a…

An open challenge in recent machine learning is about how to improve the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) in a black-box setting, i.e., without access to detailed information such as output token probabilities. Existing…

Checklists have been widely recognized as effective tools for completing complex tasks in a systematic manner. Although originally intended for use in procedural tasks, their interpretability and ease of use have led to their adoption for…

Generating adversarial examples in a black-box setting retains a significant challenge with vast practical application prospects. In particular, existing black-box attacks suffer from the need for excessive queries, as it is non-trivial to…

An important pillar for safe machine learning (ML) is the systematic mitigation of weaknesses in neural networks to afford their deployment in critical applications. An ubiquitous class of safety risks are learned shortcuts, i.e. spurious…

Learning a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from a fixed batch of trajectories is a non-trivial task whose outcome's quality depends on both the amount and the diversity of the sampled regions of the state-action space. Yet, many MDPs are…

Safety in stochastic control systems, which are subject to random noise with a known probability distribution, aims to compute policies that satisfy predefined operational constraints with high confidence throughout the uncertain evolution…

We present a general framework for applying machine-learning algorithms to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of these techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive exploration of the…

Today, machine learning (ML) models are increasingly applied in decision making. This induces an urgent need for quality assurance of ML models with respect to (often domain-dependent) requirements. Monotonicity is one such requirement. It…

Autonomous agents are limited in their ability to observe the world state. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) formally model the problem of planning under world state uncertainty, but POMDPs with continuous actions and…

Probabilistic model checking aims to prove whether a Markov decision process (MDP) satisfies a temporal logic specification. The underlying methods rely on an often unrealistic assumption that the MDP is precisely known. Consequently,…

Recent advances in machine learning have led to increased deployment of black-box classifiers across a wide variety of applications. In many such situations there is a critical need to both reliably assess the performance of these…