MASKS: A Multi-Artificial Neural Networks System's verification approach

<div>Artificial Neural networks are one of the most widely applied approaches for classification problems. However, developing an errorless artificial neural network is in practice impossible, due to the statistical nature of such networks. The employment of artificial neural networks in critical applications has rendered any such emerging errors, in these systems, incredibly more significant. Nevertheless, the real consequences of such errors have not been addressed, especially due to lacking verification approaches. This study aims to develop a verification method that eliminates errors through the integration of multiple artificial neural networks. In order to do this, first of all, a special property has been defined, by the authors, to extract the knowledge of these artificial neural networks. </div><div>Furthermore, a multi-agent system has been designed, itself comprised of multiple artificial neural networks, in order to check whether the aforementioned special property has been satisfied, or not. Also, in order to help examine the reasoning concerning the aggregation of the distributed knowledge, itself gained through the combined effort of separate artificial neural networks and acquired external information sources, a dynamic epistemic logic-based method has been proposed.</div><div>Finally, we believe aggregated knowledge may lead to self-awareness for the system. As a result, our model shall be capable of verifying specific inputs, if the cumulative knowledge of the entire system proves its correctness. </div><div>In conclusion, and formulated for multi-agent systems, a knowledge-sharing algorithm (Abbr. MASKS) has been developed. Which after being applied on the MNIST dataset successfully reduced the error rate to roughly one-eighth of previous runs on individual artificial neural network in the same model. </div>