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Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are extensively deployed in today's safety-critical autonomous systems thanks to their excellent performance. However, they are known to make mistakes unpredictably, e.g., a DNN may misclassify an object if it is used for perception, or issue unsafe control commands if it is used for planning and control. One common cause for such unpredictable mistakes is Out-of-Distribution (OOD) input samples, i.e., samples that fall outside of the distribution of the training dataset. We present a framework for OOD detection based on outlier detection in one or more hidden layers of a DNN with a runtime monitor based on either Isolation Forest (IF) or Local Outlier Factor (LOF). Performance evaluation indicates that LOF is a promising method in terms of both the Machine Learning metrics of precision, recall, F1 score and accuracy, as well as computational efficiency during testing.

In an open world with a long-tail distribution of input samples, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) may make unpredictable mistakes for Out-of-Distribution (OOD) inputs at test time, despite high levels of accuracy obtained during model training. OOD detection can be an effective runtime assurance mechanism for safe deployment of machine learning algorithms in safety–critical applications such as medical imaging and autonomous driving. A large number of OOD detection algorithms have been proposed in recent years, with a wide range of performance metrics in terms of accuracy and execution time. For real-time safety–critical applications, e.g., autonomous driving, timing performance is of great importance in addition to accuracy. We perform a comprehensive and systematic benchmark study of multiple OOD detection algorithms in terms of both accuracy and execution time on different hardware platforms, including a powerful workstation and a resource-constrained embedded device, equipped with both CPU and GPU. We also profile and analyze the internal details of each algorithm to identify the performance bottlenecks and potential for GPU acceleration. This paper aims to provide a useful reference for the practical deployment of OOD detection algorithms for real-time safety–critical applications.

A Deep Neural Network (DNN)’s prediction may be unreliable outside of its training distribution despite high levels of accuracy obtained during model training. The DNN may experience different degrees of accuracy degradation for different levels of distribution shifts, hence it is important to predict its performance (accuracy) under distribution shifts. In this paper, we consider the end-to-end approach to autonomous driving of using a DNN to map from an input image to the control action such as the steering angle. For each input image with possible perturbations that cause distribution shifts, we design a Performance Prediction Module to compute its anomaly score, and use it to predict the DNN’s expected prediction error, i.e., its expected deviation from the ground truth (optimal) control action, which is not available after deployment. If the expected prediction error is too large, then the DNN’s prediction may no longer be trusted, and remedial actions should be taken to ensure safety. We consider different methods for computing the anomaly score for the input image, including using the reconstruction error of an Autoencoder, or applying an Anomaly Detection algorithm to a hidden layer of the DNN. We present performance evaluation of the different methods in terms of both prediction accuracy and execution time on different hardware platforms, in order to provide a useful reference for the designer to choose among the different methods.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to developing control policies by maximizing the agent's reward. Deep reinforcement learning uses deep neural networks (DNNs) for function approximation in RL, and has achieved tremendous success in recent years. Large DNNs often incur significant memory size and computational overheads, which may impede their deployment into resource-constrained embedded systems. For deployment of a trained RL agent on embedded systems, it is necessary to compress the policy network of the RL agent to improve its memory and computation efficiency. In this article, we perform model compression of the policy network of an RL agent by leveraging the relevance scores computed by layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP), a technique for Explainable AI (XAI), to rank and prune the convolutional filters in the policy network, combined with fine-tuning with policy distillation. Performance evaluation based on several Atari games indicates that our proposed approach is effective in reducing model size and inference time of RL agents. We also consider robust RL agents trained with RADIAL-RL versus standard RL agents, and show that a robust RL agent can achieve better performance (higher average reward) after pruning than a standard RL agent for different attack strengths and pruning rates.