Master Thesis MSTR-2023-118

BibliographyLi, Yinan: Training Safe LSTMs with Input-to-State Stability Guarantees.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Master Thesis No. 118 (2023).
72 pages, english.
Abstract

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) exhibit outstanding performance when handling time-series inputs due to their ability to model latent state dynamics. This makes RNNs particularly suitable for system identification in nonlinear dynamic systems. Although neural networks possess great power and a wide range of applications, their lack of rigorous safety guarantees, such as stability and robustness, renders them uncommon in safety-critical fields like medical devices and autonomous driving. By recasting RNNs as a category of nonlinear dynamical systems and examining them through the perspective of system theory, it becomes possible to analyze their stability. Recent studies have established a sufficient condition concerning network weights that ensure Input-to-State Stability (ISS). However, the prevailing approach for enforcing this condition becomes computationally prohibitive when applied to large-scale networks and datasets due to the necessity of solving a complex, constrained nonlinear optimization problem. Furthermore, the existing techniques struggle to train the constraints to a certain desired value with such substantial scale of data and networks. To enable the training of large ISS-compatible Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) in a computationally feasible manner, this work proposes some training methods and loss function that ensure input-to-state stability for LSTMs by training the ISS constraints to a desired value while maintaining the computational benefits of backpropagation-based training. Specifically, we suggest an adaptive PID-based dynamic regularization weight approach, which ensures a good prediction performance of LSTMs while converging the ISS constraint to the specified value.

Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Analytic Computing
Superviser(s)Staab, Prof. Steffen; Niepert, Prof. Mathias; Baier, Alexandra
Entry dateSeptember 17, 2024
   Publ. Computer Science