Occlusion is a prevalent and easily realizable semantic perturbation to deep neural networks (DNNs). It can fool a DNN into misclassifying an input image by occluding some segments, possibly resulting in severe errors. Therefore, DNNs planted in safety-critical systems should be verified to be robust against occlusions prior to deployment. However, most existing robustness verification approaches for DNNs are focused on non-semantic perturbations and are not suited to the occlusion case. In this paper, we propose the first efficient, SMT-based approach for formally verifying the occlusion robustness of DNNs. We formulate the occlusion robustness verification problem and prove it is NP-complete. Then, we devise a novel approach for encoding occlusions as a part of neural networks and introduce two acceleration techniques so that the extended neural networks can be efficiently verified using off-the-shelf, SMT-based neural network verification tools. We implement our approach in a prototype called OccRob and extensively evaluate its performance on benchmark datasets with various occlusion variants. The experimental results demonstrate our approach's effectiveness and efficiency in verifying DNNs' robustness against various occlusions, and its ability to generate counterexamples when these DNNs are not robust.
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