Safety evaluation of self-driving technologies has been extensively studied. One recent approach uses Monte Carlo based evaluation to estimate the occurrence probabilities of safety-critical events as safety measures. These Monte Carlo samples are generated from stochastic input models constructed based on real-world d…
Generates multimodal safety-critical scenarios for robustness evaluation of decision-making algorithms.
problem Lack of comprehensive evaluation of neural network robustness under real-world scenarios.
method Proposes a flow-based multimodal scenario generator using weighted likelihood maximization and gradient-based sampling.
result Demonstrates improved testing efficiency and multimodal modeling capability compared to traditional methods.
Develops a method to simulate rare dangerous events in autonomous systems.
problem Rare dangerous events in safety-critical systems are hard to test in real-world settings.
method Combines exploration, exploitation, and optimization techniques for rare-event simulation.
result Provides rigorous guarantees for the performance of the method.
Deep-PrAE improves rare-event simulation for black-box systems.
problem Evaluating rare safety-critical events in learning-based systems.
method Combines deep neural networks with IS to create statistically guaranteed estimations.
result Deep-PrAE provides accurate bounds on safety-critical event probabilities.
This paper tackles sandbagging in AI safety evaluations.
problem AI agents may hide dangerous capabilities to avoid being deactivated.
method Developed a simple model of strategic deception in sequential decision-making tasks.
result Demonstrated that optimal rational agents exhibit sandbagging behavior.
Study evaluates conformal prediction methods for safety in vision models under shifts and long-tailed data.
problem Safety guarantees of conformal prediction methods under distribution shifts and long-tailed data.
method Empirical evaluation of post-hoc and training-based conformal prediction methods on large-scale datasets and models.
result Performance of conformal prediction methods degrades significantly under distribution shifts and long-tailed data.
Deep learning methods are widely regarded as indispensable when it comes to designing perception pipelines for autonomous agents such as robots, drones or automated vehicles. The main reasons, however, for deep learning not being used for autonomous agents at large scale already are safety concerns. Deep learning appro…
RAGuard improves safety in LLMs for offshore wind maintenance.
problem Conventional LLMs fail with specialised or unexpected scenarios in offshore wind maintenance.
method Integrates safety-critical documents alongside technical manuals in RAG framework.
result RAGuard increases safety recall from almost 0% to over 50% while maintaining technical recall above 60%.
Each year, around 6 million car accidents occur in the U.S. on average. Road safety features (e.g., concrete barriers, metal crash barriers, rumble strips) play an important role in preventing or mitigating vehicle crashes. Accurate maps of road safety features is an important component of safety management systems for…
Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to synthesizing policies for challenging robotics tasks. A key problem is how to ensure safety of the learned policy---e.g., that a walking robot does not fall over or that an autonomous car does not run into an obstacle. We focus on the setting where the dynamics are know…
Paper defines and quantifies safety risks in deep neural networks.
problem Safety concerns in deep neural networks applied to critical sectors.
method Defines safety property, computes maximum safe radius, identifies new risk class, develops algorithm.
result Method achieves competitive performance in safety quantification.
Study probabilistic safety of BNNs under adversarial attacks.
problem Evaluate vulnerability of BNNs to adversarial attacks.
method Relaxation techniques from non-convex optimization to compute probabilistic safety bounds.
result Certify probabilistic safety of BNNs with millions of parameters.
A novel approach for safe offline RL using latent safety constraints.
problem Balancing safety constraints and reward maximization in offline RL.
method Conditional Variational Autoencoders for latent safety modeling, Constrained Reward-Return Maximization.
result Our approach maintains safety compliance while optimizing rewards, outperforming existing methods.
Safe learning of stochastic dynamics with safety constraints.
problem Learning controlled stochastic dynamics with safety constraints.
method Iterative expansion of a safe control set using kernel-based confidence bounds.
result The method ensures safe exploration and efficient estimation of system dynamics.
New method provides scalable safety guarantees for RL agents.
problem Safe reinforcement learning in real-life scenarios.
method State-augmentation and shield design for probabilistic avoidance.
result Strict formal safety guarantees for RL agents, scalable and practical.
Holographic Invariant Storage uses vector architectures to ensure LLM safety at design time.
problem Mitigating context drift in large language models (LLMs) during deployment.
method Introduces Holographic Invariant Storage (HIS) protocol that combines known properties of bipolar Vector Symbolic Architectures into a design-time safety contract.
result Closed-form guarantees for single-signal recovery fidelity, continuous-noise robustness, and multi-signal capacity degradation are provided and validated.
Safe Bayesian optimization method using information theory.
problem Optimizing unknown functions while respecting safety constraints.
method Information-theoretic exploration criterion for continuous domains.
result The method learns the value of the safe optimum up to arbitrary precision.
ARTEO algorithm optimizes safety-critical systems with uncertainty.
problem Decision-making under uncertainty with safety constraints in real-time optimization.
method ARTEO algorithm uses multi-armed bandits as a mathematical programming problem subject to safety constraints, learning unknown characteristics through exploration and incorporating uncertainty quantification.
result ARTEO achieves less cumulative regret with accurate and safe decisions.
Video applications and analytics are routinely projected as a stressing and significant service of the Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network. As part of a NIST PSCR funded effort, the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and MIT Lincoln Laboratory have been developing a computer vision dataset o…
In order to satisfy safety conditions, an agent may be constrained from acting freely. A safe controller can be designed a priori if an environment is well understood, but not when learning is employed. In particular, reinforcement learned (RL) controllers require exploration, which can be hazardous in safety critical …
Extends neural net safety guarantees by proving structural properties.
problem Proving formal guarantees for complex DNN architectures.
method Proves structural properties related to neural net structure to infer safety properties.
result Identifies a larger region of input space for safety properties.
CitySim dataset captures vehicle trajectories for safety research.
problem Lack of fine-grain vehicle trajectories for safety-oriented research.
method Five-step procedure: video stabilization, object filtering, stitching, detection, and error filtering.
result CitySim dataset improves safety evaluations and facilitates digital-twin research.
New benchmark uncovers hidden biases in LLMs that refuse to answer certain queries.
problem Evaluating fairness in LLMs, especially in sensitive applications.
method Silenced Bias Benchmark (SBB) using activation steering to reduce model refusals during QA.
result Exposes hidden unfair preferences in LLMs' latent space, distinguishing direct responses from underlying fairness issues.
A new RL model ensures safe learning in uncertain environments.
problem Safe reinforcement learning in uncertain, partially observable environments.
method Lyapunov-based uncertainty quantification and Transformers for memory.
result Significant improvement in safety and optimality in grid-world tasks.
This paper compares uncertainty estimation methods for deep learning in autonomous vehicles.
problem Ensuring safety in autonomous vehicles through accurate uncertainty quantification in deep learning models.
method A comparative survey of uncertainty quantification methods in deep neural networks.
result Different methods for uncertainty quantification in DNNs have advantages and downsides for specific AV tasks and types of uncertainty.
Bayesian optimization sped up with model approximations for safe online system optimization.
problem Efficiently optimize systems with safety guarantees under noisy conditions.
method Incorporate reduced physical models into Bayesian optimization, using Markov chain Monte Carlo for robust safety bounds.
result Significant acceleration of optimization for expensive functions with robust safety guarantees.
SECRM-2D improves RL-based autonomous driving with safety guarantees.
problem Safety and efficiency trade-offs in RL-based autonomous driving.
method RL-based controller with safety constraints for efficient and comfortable driving.
result SECRM-2D avoids crashes and improves efficiency and comfort compared to baselines.
The variability of the clusters generated by clustering techniques in the domain of latitude and longitude variables of fatal crash data are significantly unpredictable. This unpredictability, caused by the randomness of fatal crash incidents, reduces the accuracy of crash frequency (i.e., counts of fatal crashes per c…
Affective states have a critical role in driving performance and safety. They can degrade driver situation awareness and negatively impact cognitive processes, severely diminishing road safety. Therefore, detecting and assessing drivers' affective states is crucial in order to help improve the driving experience, and i…
ProEval efficiently estimates AI performance and discovers failures using pre-trained Gaussian Processes.
problem Resource-intensive evaluation of generative AI models.
method ProEval uses pre-trained Gaussian Processes and Bayesian quadrature to estimate performance and discover failures.
result ProEval requires significantly fewer samples to achieve accurate performance estimates and reveals more diverse failure cases.
Safe Bayesian optimization tackles safety constraints in control engineering.
problem Handling safety constraints in parameter tuning of control systems.
method Lipschitz-only Safe Bayesian Optimization (LoSBO) and LoS-GP-UCB.
result SafeBO algorithms can violate safety constraints due to unreliable uncertainty bounds.
Enforcing safety is a key aspect of many problems pertaining to sequential decision making under uncertainty, which require the decisions made at every step to be both informative of the optimal decision and also safe. For example, we value both efficacy and comfort in medical therapy, and efficiency and safety in robo…
Safe active learning for time-series models with Gaussian processes.
problem Learning time-series models while respecting safety constraints.
method Employing Gaussian processes with a nonlinear exogenous input structure, the approach dynamically explores the input space to generate data for model learning.
result The approach effectively learns time-series models under safety constraints, as demonstrated in a technical application.
The paper evaluates and improves uncertainty estimates in neural networks for safety-critical applications.
problem Quantifying uncertainty in neural networks for safety-critical systems.
method Proposes a statistical test for evaluating uncertainty realism in neural networks and transfers a classification architecture to image-to-image tasks.
result The variational U-Net architecture significantly improves uncertainty realism in image-to-image tasks compared to a plain model.
Quantum model improves safety in machine learning.
problem Improving safety and robustness in machine learning models.
method Variational quantum classifier with amplitude encoding and SAFE-AI metrics.
result Quantum model provides competitive performance and improved robustness.
DL models for MTS regression are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, posing risks in safety-critical applications.
problem Vulnerability of DL models to adversarial examples in MTS regression.
method Adversarial attack generation techniques from image classification were adapted for MTS.
result All state-of-the-art DL regression models (CNN, LSTM, GRU) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks.
SEEDA optimizes dose allocation in clinical trials to balance efficacy and safety.
problem Complex relationships between efficacy and toxicity in new drug trials.
method Adaptive clinical trial methodology that maximizes cumulative efficacy while ensuring safety constraints.
result SEEDA outperforms existing methods in finding optimal doses with higher success rates and fewer patients.
New bounds on predicting agent behavior from behavior alone.
problem Predicting agent beliefs and intentions from observed behavior.
method Derivation of bounds on agent behavior in new environments under assumption of world model.
result Theoretical limits on predicting intentional agents from behavioral data.
Suitability filter detects model performance degradation in real-world deployment.
problem Ensuring model reliability in safety-critical domains without access to ground truth labels.
method Uses suitability signals to evaluate classifier performance on unlabeled user data.
result The suitability filter reliably detects performance deviations due to covariate shift.
A rise in popularity of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), attributed to more powerful GPUs and widely available datasets, has seen them being increasingly used within safety-critical domains. One such domain, self-driving, has benefited from significant performance improvements, with millions of miles having been driven wit…
Paper explores anchoring for vision models, improving generalization and safety.
problem Anchoring can lead to undesirable shortcuts, limiting generalization.
method Introduced a new anchored training protocol with a regularizer to mitigate undesirable shortcuts.
result Significant performance gains in generalization and safety metrics.
In many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems, besides optimizing the main objective function, an agent must concurrently avoid violating a number of constraints. In particular, besides optimizing performance it is crucial to guarantee the safety of an agent during training as well as deployment (e.g. a robot…
While machine learning systems show high success rate in many complex tasks, research shows they can also fail in very unexpected situations. Rise of machine learning products in safety-critical industries cause an increase in attention in evaluating model robustness and estimating failure probability in machine learni…
The paper proposes a method to assess when automated predictions are reliable.
problem Ensuring reliability and safety of automated decision-making in machine learning.
method Clustering to measure distances between outputs and class centroids, defining a safety threshold based on these distances.
result The proposed metric can efficiently determine when automated predictions are acceptable and when they should be deferred.
Survey of alignment techniques for large language models.
problem Ensuring large language models align with human values.
method Analysis of diverse alignment methods and training paradigms.
result Preference-based methods offer more flexibility for nuanced alignment.
PEOC uses policy entropy to detect untrained states in RL.
problem Detecting untrained states in reinforcement learning for safety.
method Policy entropy based one-class classifier.
result PEOC is highly competitive and reliable.
ALMANACS benchmarks explainability methods on simulatability.
problem Evaluating the effectiveness of explainability methods for language models.
method ALMANACS is a simulatability benchmark that evaluates explainability methods on twelve safety-relevant topics.
result No explainability method outperforms the explanation-free control across all topics.
The paper tackles MAP inference over non-convex constraints in safety-critical settings.
problem Efficiently computing MAP predictions subject to non-convex constraints is challenging.
method The paper investigates conditions for exact and efficient MAP inference over continuous variables and devises scalable algorithms for both tractable and general cases.
result The proposed methods outperform constraint-agnostic baselines and scale to complex densities.