Repairing Learned Controllers with Convex Optimization: A Case Study

Despite the increasing popularity of Machine Learning methods, their usage in safety-critical applications is sometimes limited by the impossibility of providing formal guarantees on their behaviour. In this work we focus on one such application, where Kernel Ridge Regression with Random Fourier Features is used to learn controllers for a prosthetic hand. Due to the non-linearity of the activation function used, these controllers sometimes fail in correctly identifying users’ intention. Under specific circumstances muscular activation levels may be misinterpreted by the method, resulting in the prosthetic hand not behaving as intended. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel method to verify the presence of this kind of intent detection mismatch and to repair controllers leveraging off-the-shelf LP technology without using additional data. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using datasets gathered from human participants.