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Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.36
Efficient Neural Network Verification via Order Leading Exploration of Branch-and-Bound Trees

Authors: Guanqin Zhang, Kota Fukuda, Zhenya Zhang, H.M.N. Dilum Bandara, Shiping Chen, Jianjun Zhao, and Yulei Sui

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 333, 39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025)

Abstract
The vulnerability of neural networks to adversarial perturbations has necessitated formal verification techniques that can rigorously certify the quality of neural networks. As the state-of-the-art, branch-and-bound (BaB) is a "divide-and-conquer" strategy that applies off-the-shelf verifiers to sub-problems for which they perform better. While BaB can identify the sub-problems that are necessary to be split, it explores the space of these sub-problems in a naive "first-come-first-served" manner, thereby suffering from an issue of inefficiency to reach a verification conclusion. To bridge this gap, we introduce an order over different sub-problems produced by BaB, concerning with their different likelihoods of containing counterexamples. Based on this order, we propose a novel verification framework Oliva that explores the sub-problem space by prioritizing those sub-problems that are more likely to find counterexamples, in order to efficiently reach the conclusion of the verification. Even if no counterexample can be found in any sub-problem, it only changes the order of visiting different sub-problems and so will not lead to a performance degradation. Specifically, Oliva has two variants, including Oliva^GR, a greedy strategy that always prioritizes the sub-problems that are more likely to find counterexamples, and Oliva^SA, a balanced strategy inspired by simulated annealing that gradually shifts from exploration to exploitation to locate the globally optimal sub-problems. We experimentally evaluate the performance of Oliva on 690 verification problems spanning over 5 models with datasets MNIST and CIFAR-10. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, we demonstrate the speedup of Oliva for up to 25× in MNIST, and up to 80× in CIFAR-10.
Cite as

Guanqin Zhang, Kota Fukuda, Zhenya Zhang, H.M.N. Dilum Bandara, Shiping Chen, Jianjun Zhao, and Yulei Sui. Efficient Neural Network Verification via Order Leading Exploration of Branch-and-Bound Trees. In 39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 333, pp. 36:1-36:29, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{zhang_et_al:LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.36,
  author =	{Zhang, Guanqin and Fukuda, Kota and Zhang, Zhenya and Bandara, H.M.N. Dilum and Chen, Shiping and Zhao, Jianjun and Sui, Yulei},
  title =	{{Efficient Neural Network Verification via Order Leading Exploration of Branch-and-Bound Trees}},
  booktitle =	{39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025)},
  pages =	{36:1--36:29},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-373-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{333},
  editor =	{Aldrich, Jonathan and Silva, Alexandra},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.36},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-233281},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.36},
  annote =	{Keywords: neural network verification, branch and bound, counterexample potentiality, simulated annealing, stochastic optimization}
}
Document
Artifact
DOI: 10.4230/DARTS.11.2.11
Efficient Neural Network Verification via Order Leading Exploration of Branch-and-Bound Trees (Artifact)

Authors: Guanqin Zhang, Kota Fukuda, Zhenya Zhang, H.M.N. Dilum Bandara, Shiping Chen, Jianjun Zhao, and Yulei Sui

Published in: DARTS, Volume 11, Issue 2, Special Issue of the 39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025)

Abstract
The vulnerability of neural networks to adversarial perturbations has necessitated formal verification techniques that can rigorously certify the quality of neural networks. As the state-of-the-art, branch and bound (BaB) is a "divide-and-conquer" strategy that applies off-the-shelf verifiers to sub-problems for which they perform better. While BaB can identify the sub-problems that need to be split, it explores the space of these sub-problems in a naive "first-come-first-served" manner, thereby suffering from an issue of inefficiency in reaching a verification conclusion. To bridge this gap, we introduce an order over different sub-problems produced by BaB, concerning their different likelihoods of containing counterexamples. Based on this order, we propose a novel verification framework Oliva that explores the sub-problem space by prioritizing those sub-problems that are more likely to find counterexamples, to efficiently reach the conclusion of the verification. Even if no counterexample can be found in any sub-problem, it only changes the order of visiting different sub-problem and so will not lead to a performance degradation. Specifically, Oliva has two variants, including Oliva^GR, a greedy strategy that always prioritizes the sub-problems that are more likely to find counterexamples, and Oliva^SA, a balanced strategy inspired by simulated annealing that gradually shifts from exploration to exploitation to locate the globally optimal sub-problems. We experimentally evaluate the performance of Oliva on 690 verification problems spanning over 5 models with datasets MNIST and CIFAR-10. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, we demonstrate the speedup of Oliva for up to 25× in MNIST, and up to 80× in CIFAR-10.
Cite as

Guanqin Zhang, Kota Fukuda, Zhenya Zhang, H.M.N. Dilum Bandara, Shiping Chen, Jianjun Zhao, and Yulei Sui. Efficient Neural Network Verification via Order Leading Exploration of Branch-and-Bound Trees (Artifact). In Special Issue of the 39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025). Dagstuhl Artifacts Series (DARTS), Volume 11, Issue 2, pp. 11:1-11:3, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@Article{zhang_et_al:DARTS.11.2.11,
  author =	{Zhang, Guanqin and Fukuda, Kota and Zhang, Zhenya and Bandara, H.M.N. Dilum and Chen, Shiping and Zhao, Jianjun and Sui, Yulei},
  title =	{{Efficient Neural Network Verification via Order Leading Exploration of Branch-and-Bound Trees (Artifact)}},
  pages =	{11:1--11:3},
  journal =	{Dagstuhl Artifacts Series},
  ISSN =	{2509-8195},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{11},
  number =	{2},
  editor =	{Zhang, Guanqin and Fukuda, Kota and Zhang, Zhenya and Bandara, H.M.N. Dilum and Chen, Shiping and Zhao, Jianjun and Sui, Yulei},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/DARTS.11.2.11},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-233545},
  doi =		{10.4230/DARTS.11.2.11},
  annote =	{Keywords: neural network verification, branch and bound, counterexample potentiality, simulated annealing, stochastic optimization}
}
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