Guideline for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence -- AI Assessment Catalog

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.

A Survey on Uncertainty Toolkits for Deep Learning

The success of deep learning (DL) fostered the creation of unifying frameworks such as tensorflow or pytorch as much as it was driven by their creation in return. Having common building blocks facilitates the exchange of, e.g., models or concepts and makes developments easier replicable. Nonetheless, robust and reliable evaluation and assessment of DL models has often proven challenging. This is at odds with their increasing safety relevance, which recently culminated in the field of "trustworthy ML". We believe that, among others, further unification of evaluation and safeguarding methodologies in terms of toolkits, i.e., small and specialized framework derivatives, might positively impact problems of trustworthiness as well as reproducibility. To this end, we present the first survey on toolkits for uncertainty estimation (UE) in DL, as UE forms a cornerstone in assessing model reliability. We investigate 11 toolkits with respect to modeling and evaluation capabilities, providing an in-depth comparison for the three most promising ones, namely Pyro, Tensorflow Probability, and Uncertainty Quantification 360. While the first two provide a large degree of flexibility and seamless integration into their respective framework, the last one has the larger methodological scope.

Inspect, Understand, Overcome: A Survey of Practical Methods for AI Safety

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.