Formal Methods in AI

Formal Methods in AI (FMAI) is Dr. Francesco Belardinelli's research group at Imperial College London dedicated to mathematically grounded techniques for specifying, verifying, and monitoring intelligent systems deployed in safety-critical settings.

Affiliated with
Imperial College London crest UKRI Safe and Trusted AI CDT logo
Research

Verification for RL systems

Methods that combine formal verification, synthesis, and neurosymbolic methods with modern ML and RL models, focusing on robustness, correctness, and alignment with high-level specifications.

Methods

Specifications, logics, and synthesis

Specification languages, causal reasoning, temporal and probabilistic logics, and synthesis tools for capturing what it means for AI systems to be safe, predictable, and auditable.

Practice

Infrastructure and open-source tooling

Reusable software components, benchmarks, and verification pipelines to make rigorous safety techniques practical for real-world deployments.

Latest news

Updates from the group

A quick snapshot of announcements, papers, and milestones from FMAI.

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15 Jan 2025

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What we focus on

We collaborate across formal methods, programming languages, control, and machine learning to tackle questions such as:

  • Providing formal guarantees of permissive safety for single and multi-agent reinforcement learning agents.
  • How to prove properties of models that learn and update over time.
  • How to detect and mitigate violations at runtime with guarantees.
  • How to integrate verification into existing RL, ML and engineering workflows.

Collaborations & community

The group works with academic and industrial partners on open-source tools, benchmarks, and case studies in robotics, cyber-physical systems, and foundation models.

For collaborations or student opportunities, please get in touch via e-mail: francesco[dot]belardinelli[at]imperial.ac.uk.