Toward Requirements Specification for Machine-Learned Components

In current practice, the behavior of Machine-Learned Components (MLCs) is not sufficiently specified by the predefined requirements. Instead, they “learn” existing patterns from the available training data, and make predictions for unseen data when deployed. On the surface, their ability to extract patterns and to behave accordingly is specifically useful for hard-to-specify concepts in certain safety critical domains (e.g., the definition of a …