SDLV: Verification of Steering Angle Safety for Self-Driving Cars

Self-driving cars over the last decade have achieved significant progress like driving millions of miles without any human intervention. However, behavioral safety in applying deep-neural-network-based (DNN based) systems for self-driving cars could not be guaranteed. Several real-world accidents involving self-driving cars have already happened, some of which have led to fatal collisions. In this paper, we present a novel and automated technique for verifying steering angle safety for self-driving cars. The technique is based on deep learning verification (DLV), which is an automated verification framework for safety of image classification neural networks. We extend DLV by leveraging neuron coverage and slack relationship to solve the judgement problem of predicted behaviors, and thus, to achieve verification of steering angle safety for self-driving cars. We evaluate our technique on the NVIDIA’s end-to-end self-driving architecture, which is a crucial ingredient in many modern self-driving cars. Experimental results show that our technique can successfully find adversarial misclassifications (i.e., incorrect steering decisions) within given regions if they exist. Therefore, we can achieve safety verification (if no misclassification is found for all DNN layers, in which case the network can be said to be stable or reliable w.r.t. steering decisions) or falsification (in which case the adversarial examples can be used to fine-tune the network).