We are living in a golden age of machine learning. Powerful models perform many tasks far better than is possible using traditional software engineering approaches alone. However, developing and deploying these models in existing software systems remains challenging. In this paper, we present SmartChoices, a novel approach to incorporating machine learning into mature software stacks easily, safely, and effectively. We highlight key design decisions and present case studies applying SmartChoices within a range of large-scale industrial systems.

We explore the concept of co-design in the context of neural network verification. Specifically, we aim to train deep neural networks that not only are robust to adversarial perturbations but also whose robustness can be verified more easily. To this end, we identify two properties of network models - weight sparsity and so-called ReLU stability - that turn out to significantly impact the complexity of the corresponding verification task. We demonstrate that improving weight sparsity alone already enables us to turn computationally intractable verification problems into tractable ones. Then, improving ReLU stability leads to an additional 4-13x speedup in verification times. An important feature of our methodology is its "universality," in the sense that it can be used with a broad range of training procedures and verification approaches.