# Lookahead Branching for Neural Network Verification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17290 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17290/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Reluplex: An Efficient SMT Solver for Verifying Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01135/) (2017)
- [Efficient Neural Network Robustness Certification with General Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00866/) (2018)
- [Reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10369/) (2024)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning framework for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02532/) (2017)
- [Fast and Complete: Enabling Complete Neural Network Verification with Rapid and Massively Parallel Incomplete Verifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13824/) (2020)
- [Branch and Bound for Piecewise Linear Neural Network Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06588/) (2019)
- [General Cutting Planes for Bound-Propagation-Based Neural Network Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05740/) (2022)
- [Marabou 2.0: A Versatile Formal Analyzer of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14461/) (2024)
- [Neural Network Verification with Branch-and-Bound for General Nonlinearities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21063/) (2024)
- [Neural Network Branching for Neural Network Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01329/) (2019)
- [Parallelization Techniques for Verifying Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08440/) (2020)
- [Scalable Neural Network Verification with Branch-and-bound Inferred Cutting Planes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00200/) (2024)
- [Efficient Neural Network Analysis with Sum-of-Infeasibilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11201/) (2022)
- [Clip-and-Verify: Linear Constraint-Driven Domain Clipping for Accelerating Neural Network Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11087/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Learning Lookahead Lemmas for Neural Network Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29051/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we investigate the effect of lookahead branching strategies in neural network verification. We present a general recipe to integrate lookahead into any branch-and-bound verifier and demonstrate how one of the current state-of-the-art branching heuristics, FSB, can be viewed as a special instantiation of the lookahead branching strategy. We also describe how, in addition to improving the quality of branching decisions, lookahead can generate additional lemmas that accelerate verification. We instantiate the method in two representative branch-and-bound-based verifiers (Marabou and α-β-CROWN), and demonstrate that lookahead leads to consistent speedups in verification time and up to 57% more solved instances. Code is available at https://github.com/ai-ar-research/lookahead-branching.