# Fast SDP certification of neural networks : towards large multi-class datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03232 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03232/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [The Limitations of Deep Learning in Adversarial Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07528/) (2015)
- [Reluplex: An Efficient SMT Solver for Verifying Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01135/) (2017)
- [Provable defenses against adversarial examples via the convex outer adversarial polytope](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00851/) (2017)
- [Provably Robust Deep Learning via Adversarially Trained Smoothed Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04584/) (2019)
- [Safety Verification of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06940/) (2016)
- [Towards Fast Computation of Certified Robustness for ReLU Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09699/) (2018)
- [Formal Verification of Piece-Wise Linear Feed-Forward Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01320/) (2017)
- [Beta-CROWN: Efficient Bound Propagation with Per-neuron Split Constraints for Complete and Incomplete Neural Network Robustness Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06624/) (2021)
- [Semidefinite relaxations for certifying robustness to adversarial examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01057/) (2018)
- [Branch and Bound for Piecewise Linear Neural Network Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06588/) (2019)
- [Continual Learning with Node-Importance based Adaptive Group Sparse Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13726/) (2020)
- [SoK: Certified Robustness for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04131/) (2020)
- [General Cutting Planes for Bound-Propagation-Based Neural Network Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05740/) (2022)
- [Maximum Resilience of Artificial Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01040/) (2017)
- [Complete Verification via Multi-Neuron Relaxation Guided Branch-and-Bound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00263/) (2022)
- [Marabou 2.0: A Versatile Formal Analyzer of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14461/) (2024)
- [Enabling certification of verification-agnostic networks via memory-efficient semidefinite programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11645/) (2020)
- [Neural Network Branching for Neural Network Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01329/) (2019)
- [Lossless Compression of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00218/) (2020)
- [Scalable Neural Network Verification with Branch-and-bound Inferred Cutting Planes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00200/) (2024)
- [On the Tightness of Semidefinite Relaxations for Certifying Robustness to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06759/) (2020)
- [SDP-CROWN: Efficient Bound Propagation for Neural Network Verification with Tightness of Semidefinite Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06665/) (2025)
- [Neural Network Branch-and-Bound for Neural Network Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12855/) (2021)
- [Tight Certification of Adversarially Trained Neural Networks via Nonconvex Low-Rank Semidefinite Relaxations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17244/) (2022)
- [Accelerating Low-Rank Factorization-Based Semidefinite Programming Algorithms on GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15049/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a new quadratic model for the certification problem in adversarial robustness, which simultaneously accounts for all possible target classes. Building on this model, we propose a novel semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for incomplete verification. A key advantage of our approach is that it certifies robustness in a single optimization, avoiding the need for a separate resolution per class. This yields a significant computational speed-up and enables scalability to large datasets with many classes. To further improve efficiency, we also propose an effective pruning strategy of active neurons, thus reducing the problem dimensionality and accelerating convergence.
