Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made impressive progress in recent years and represents a key technology that has a crucial impact on the economy and society. However, it is clear that AI and business models based on it can only reach their full potential if AI applications are developed according to high quality standards and are effectively protected against new AI risks. For instance, AI bears the risk of unfair treatment of individuals when processing personal data e.g., to support credit lending or staff recruitment decisions. The emergence of these new risks is closely linked to the fact that the behavior of AI applications, particularly those based on Machine Learning (ML), is essentially learned from large volumes of data and is not predetermined by fixed programmed rules. Thus, the issue of the trustworthiness of AI applications is crucial and is the subject of numerous major publications by stakeholders in politics, business and society. In addition, there is mutual agreement that the requirements for trustworthy AI, which are often described in an abstract way, must now be made clear and tangible. One challenge to overcome here relates to the fact that the specific quality criteria for an AI application depend heavily on the application context and possible measures to fulfill them in turn depend heavily on the AI technology used. Lastly, practical assessment procedures are needed to evaluate whether specific AI applications have been developed according to adequate quality standards. This AI assessment catalog addresses exactly this point and is intended for two target groups: Firstly, it provides developers with a guideline for systematically making their AI applications trustworthy. Secondly, it guides assessors and auditors on how to examine AI applications for trustworthiness in a structured way.

The use of deep neural networks (DNNs) in safety-critical applications like mobile health and autonomous driving is challenging due to numerous model-inherent shortcomings. These shortcomings are diverse and range from a lack of generalization over insufficient interpretability to problems with malicious inputs. Cyber-physical systems employing DNNs are therefore likely to suffer from safety concerns. In recent years, a zoo of state-of-the-art techniques aiming to address these safety concerns has emerged. This work provides a structured and broad overview of them. We first identify categories of insufficiencies to then describe research activities aiming at their detection, quantification, or mitigation. Our paper addresses both machine learning experts and safety engineers: The former ones might profit from the broad range of machine learning topics covered and discussions on limitations of recent methods. The latter ones might gain insights into the specifics of modern ML methods. We moreover hope that our contribution fuels discussions on desiderata for ML systems and strategies on how to propel existing approaches accordingly.

Statistical models are inherently uncertain. Quantifying or at least upper-bounding their uncertainties is vital for safety-critical systems such as autonomous vehicles. While standard neural networks do not report this information, several approaches exist to integrate uncertainty estimates into them. Assessing the quality of these uncertainty estimates is not straightforward, as no direct ground truth labels are available. Instead, implicit statistical assessments are required. For regression, we propose to evaluate uncertainty realism -- a strict quality criterion -- with a Mahalanobis distance-based statistical test. An empirical evaluation reveals the need for uncertainty measures that are appropriate to upper-bound heavy-tailed empirical errors. Alongside, we transfer the variational U-Net classification architecture to standard supervised image-to-image tasks. We adopt it to the automotive domain and show that it significantly improves uncertainty realism compared to a plain encoder-decoder model.

Quantification of uncertainty is one of the most promising approaches to establish safe machine learning. Despite its importance, it is far from being generally solved, especially for neural networks. One of the most commonly used approaches so far is Monte Carlo dropout, which is computationally cheap and easy to apply in practice. However, it can underestimate the uncertainty. We propose a new objective, referred to as second-moment loss (SML), to address this issue. While the full network is encouraged to model the mean, the dropout networks are explicitly used to optimize the model variance. We intensively study the performance of the new objective on various UCI regression datasets. Comparing to the state-of-the-art of deep ensembles, SML leads to comparable prediction accuracies and uncertainty estimates while only requiring a single model. Under distribution shift, we observe moderate improvements. As a side result, we introduce an intuitive Wasserstein distance-based uncertainty measure that is non-saturating and thus allows to resolve quality differences between any two uncertainty estimates.

Quantification of uncertainty is one of the most promising approaches to establish safe machine learning. Despite its importance, it is far from being generally solved, especially for neural networks. One of the most commonly used approaches so far is Monte Carlo dropout, which is computationally cheap and easy to apply in practice. However, it can underestimate the uncertainty. We propose a new objective, referred to as second-moment loss (SML), to address this issue. While the full network is encouraged to model the mean, the dropout networks are explicitly used to optimize the model variance. We analyze the performance of the new objective on various toy and UCI regression datasets. Comparing to the state-of-the-art of deep ensembles, SML leads to comparable prediction accuracies and uncertainty estimates while only requiring a single model. Under distribution shift, we observe moderate improvements. From a safety perspective also the study of worst-case uncertainties is crucial. In this regard we improve considerably. Finally, we show that SML can be successfully applied to SqueezeDet, a modern object detection network. We improve on its uncertainty-related scores while not deteriorating regression quality. As a side result, we introduce an intuitive Wasserstein distance-based uncertainty measure that is non-saturating and thus allows to resolve quality differences between any two uncertainty estimates.

We propose DenseHMM - a modification of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) that allows to learn dense representations of both the hidden states and the observables. Compared to the standard HMM, transition probabilities are not atomic but composed of these representations via kernelization. Our approach enables constraint-free and gradient-based optimization. We propose two optimization schemes that make use of this: a modification of the Baum-Welch algorithm and a direct co-occurrence optimization. The latter one is highly scalable and comes empirically without loss of performance compared to standard HMMs. We show that the non-linearity of the kernelization is crucial for the expressiveness of the representations. The properties of the DenseHMM like learned co-occurrences and log-likelihoods are studied empirically on synthetic and biomedical datasets.

Monte Carlo (MC) dropout is one of the state-of-the-art approaches for uncertainty estimation in neural networks (NNs). It has been interpreted as approximately performing Bayesian inference. Based on previous work on the approximation of Gaussian processes by wide and deep neural networks with random weights, we study the limiting distribution of wide untrained NNs under dropout more rigorously and prove that they as well converge to Gaussian processes for fixed sets of weights and biases. We sketch an argument that this property might also hold for infinitely wide feed-forward networks that are trained with (full-batch) gradient descent. The theory is contrasted by an empirical analysis in which we find correlations and non-Gaussian behaviour for the pre-activations of finite width NNs. We therefore investigate how (strongly) correlated pre-activations can induce non-Gaussian behavior in NNs with strongly correlated weights.

We propose an efficient protocol for decentralized training of deep neural networks from distributed data sources. The proposed protocol allows to handle different phases of model training equally well and to quickly adapt to concept drifts. This leads to a reduction of communication by an order of magnitude compared to periodically communicating state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, we derive a communication bound that scales well with the hardness of the serialized learning problem. The reduction in communication comes at almost no cost, as the predictive performance remains virtually unchanged. Indeed, the proposed protocol retains loss bounds of periodically averaging schemes. An extensive empirical evaluation validates major improvement of the trade-off between model performance and communication which could be beneficial for numerous decentralized learning applications, such as autonomous driving, or voice recognition and image classification on mobile phones.