AI Center Seminar - AI Fundamentals series - Prof. Anna Lukina

The talk is organized by the EPFL AI Center as part of the AI fundamentals seminar series.

Hosting professor: Prof. Clément Pit-Claudel

Title
Advancing Safe Autonomy: Neural Certificates, Reusable Guarantees, and Interpretable Policies

Abstract
Recent advances in neural certification and reinforcement learning are enabling safer and more adaptable autonomous systems. This talk unites four key contributions: First, I will discuss neural continuous-time supermartingale certificates, which provide probabilistic safety guarantees for continuous-time stochastic systems. Second, I will introduce VeRecycle, a theoretical framework for efficiently reusing probabilistic certificates after system changes, drastically reducing the need for costly re-certification. I will also present a modular approach to reinforcement learning, where formally verified sub-policies are safely composed for end-to-end guarantees. Finally, I will demonstrate how interpetable policies can be synthesized directly from black-box simulations using search and optimizartion. Together, these works push the boundaries of safe, scalable, and adaptive autonomy in uncertain environments.

Bio
Dr. Anna Lukina is an Assistant Professor and Delft Technology Fellow, leading a team of researchers at TU Delft, The Netherlands, on trustworthy and interpretable AI systems via combining formal methods and machine learning. In 2023, Dr. Lukina was awarded a personal grant from the Dutch Research Council on Explainable Monitoring. She has been a long-term visiting scholar at Simons-Berkeley. She is co-founder and co-chair of the International Symposium of AI Verification. In 2022, she founded an award-winning Future Female+ Faculty Program on improving the diversity of international professor talent. Dr. Lukina obtained her Ph.D. in computer science from Vienna University of Technology. Her doctoral thesis was focused on control and verification of cyber-physical systems. Before joining TU Delft, she was a postdoc with Prof. Thomas A. Henzinger at ISTA in Austria.