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Bardh Hoxha

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Vision-Based Runtime Monitoring under Varying Specifications using Semantic Latent Representations

We study certified runtime monitoring of past-time signal temporal logic (ptSTL) from visual observations under partial observability. The monitor must infer safety-relevant quantities from images and provide finite-sample guarantees, while being \emph{reusable}: once trained and calibrated, it should certify any formula in a target fragment without per-formula retraining. For fragments induced by a finite dictionary of temporal atoms, we prove that the \emph{semantic basis}, the vector of atom robustness scores, is the minimum prediction target within the class of monotone, 1-Lipschitz reusable interfaces: any formula is evaluated by a deterministic decoder derived from the parse tree, and a single conformal calibration pass certifies the entire fragment with no union bound. We also introduce a \emph{rolling prediction monitor} that predicts only current predicate values and reconstructs temporal history online; this is easier to learn but grows conservative at long horizons. On a pedestrian-crossroad benchmark, rolling achieves tighter certified bounds at short horizons while the semantic-basis monitor is up to 4-times tighter at long horizons. We validate the presented monitors on real-world Waymo driving data, where both monitors satisfy the conformal coverage guarantee empirically.

preprint2022arXiv

Discovering IoT Physical Channel Vulnerabilities

Smart homes contain diverse sensors and actuators controlled by IoT apps that provide custom automation. Prior works showed that an adversary could exploit physical interaction vulnerabilities among apps and put the users and environment at risk, e.g., to break into a house, an adversary turns on the heater to trigger an app that opens windows when the temperature exceeds a threshold. Currently, the safe behavior of physical interactions relies on either app code analysis or dynamic analysis of device states with manually derived policies by developers. However, existing works fail to achieve sufficient breadth and fidelity to translate the app code into their physical behavior or provide incomplete security policies, causing poor accuracy and false alarms. In this paper, we introduce a new approach, IoTSeer, which efficiently combines app code analysis and dynamic analysis with new security policies to discover physical interaction vulnerabilities. IoTSeer works by first translating sensor events and actuator commands of each app into a physical execution model (PeM) and unifying PeMs to express composite physical execution of apps (CPeM). CPeM allows us to deploy IoTSeer in different smart homes by defining its execution parameters with minimal data collection. IoTSeer supports new security policies with intended/unintended physical channel labels. It then efficiently checks them on the CPeM via falsification, which addresses the undecidability of verification due to the continuous and discrete behavior of IoT devices. We evaluate IoTSeer in an actual house with 14 actuators, six sensors, and 39 apps. IoTSeer discovers 16 unique policy violations, whereas prior works identify only 2 out of 16 with 18 falsely flagged violations. IoTSeer only requires 30 mins of data collection for each actuator to set the CPeM parameters and is adaptive to newly added, removed, and relocated devices.

preprint2021arXiv

Risk-Bounded Control with Kalman Filtering and Stochastic Barrier Functions

In this paper, we study Stochastic Control Barrier Functions (SCBFs) to enable the design of probabilistic safe real-time controllers in presence of uncertainties and based on noisy measurements. Our goal is to design controllers that bound the probability of a system failure in finite-time to a given desired value. To that end, we first estimate the system states from the noisy measurements using an Extended Kalman filter, and compute confidence intervals on the filtering errors. Then, we account for filtering errors and derive sufficient conditions on the control input based on the estimated states to bound the probability that the real states of the system enter an unsafe region within a finite time interval. We show that these sufficient conditions are linear constraints on the control input, and, hence, they can be used in tractable optimization problems to achieve safety, in addition to other properties like reachability, and stability. Our approach is evaluated using a simulation of a lane-changing scenario on a highway with dense traffic.

preprint2020arXiv

Search-based Test-Case Generation by Monitoring Responsibility Safety Rules

The safety of Automated Vehicles (AV) as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) depends on the safety of their consisting modules (software and hardware) and their rigorous integration. Deep Learning is one of the dominant techniques used for perception, prediction, and decision making in AVs. The accuracy of predictions and decision-making is highly dependant on the tests used for training their underlying deep-learning. In this work, we propose a method for screening and classifying simulation-based driving test data to be used for training and testing controllers. Our method is based on monitoring and falsification techniques, which lead to a systematic automated procedure for generating and selecting qualified test data. We used Responsibility Sensitive Safety (RSS) rules as our qualifier specifications to filter out the random tests that do not satisfy the RSS assumptions. Therefore, the remaining tests cover driving scenarios that the controlled vehicle does not respond safely to its environment. Our framework is distributed with the publicly available S-TALIRO and Sim-ATAV tools.

preprint2015arXiv

ViSpec: A graphical tool for elicitation of MTL requirements

One of the main barriers preventing widespread use of formal methods is the elicitation of formal specifications. Formal specifications facilitate the testing and verification process for safety critical robotic systems. However, handling the intricacies of formal languages is difficult and requires a high level of expertise in formal logics that many system developers do not have. In this work, we present a graphical tool designed for the development and visualization of formal specifications by people that do not have training in formal logic. The tool enables users to develop specifications using a graphical formalism which is then automatically translated to Metric Temporal Logic (MTL). In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our tool, we have also designed and conducted a usability study with cohorts from the academic student community and industry. Our results indicate that both groups were able to define formal requirements with high levels of accuracy. Finally, we present applications of our tool for defining specifications for operation of robotic surgery and autonomous quadcopter safe operation.

preprint2014arXiv

Conformance Testing as Falsification for Cyber-Physical Systems

In Model-Based Design of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), it is often desirable to develop several models of varying fidelity. Models of different fidelity levels can enable mathematical analysis of the model, control synthesis, faster simulation etc. Furthermore, when (automatically or manually) transitioning from a model to its implementation on an actual computational platform, then again two different versions of the same system are being developed. In all previous cases, it is necessary to define a rigorous notion of conformance between different models and between models and their implementations. This paper argues that conformance should be a measure of distance between systems. Albeit a range of theoretical distance notions exists, a way to compute such distances for industrial size systems and models has not been proposed yet. This paper addresses exactly this problem. A universal notion of conformance as closeness between systems is rigorously defined, and evidence is presented that this implies a number of other application-dependent conformance notions. An algorithm for detecting that two systems are not conformant is then proposed, which uses existing proven tools. A method is also proposed to measure the degree of conformance between two systems. The results are demonstrated on a range of models.

preprint2014arXiv

On-Line Monitoring for Temporal Logic Robustness

In this paper, we provide a Dynamic Programming algorithm for on-line monitoring of the state robustness of Metric Temporal Logic specifications with past time operators. We compute the robustness of MTL with unbounded past and bounded future temporal operators MTL over sampled traces of Cyber-Physical Systems. We implemented our tool in Matlab as a Simulink block that can be used in any Simulink model. We experimentally demonstrate that the overhead of the MTL robustness monitoring is acceptable for certain classes of practical specifications.