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arXiv · 2509.21677

Prophecy: Inferring Formal Properties from Neuron Activations

Divya Gopinath·Corina S. Pasareanu·Muhammad Usman
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Abstract

We present Prophecy, a tool for automatically inferring formal properties of feed-forward neural networks. Prophecy is based on the observation that a significant part of the logic of feed-forward networks is captured in the activation status of the neurons at inner layers. Prophecy works by extracting rules based on neuron activations (values or on/off statuses) as preconditions that imply certain desirable output property, e.g., the prediction being a certain class. These rules represent network properties captured in the hidden layers that imply the desired output behavior. We present the architecture of the tool, highlight its features and demonstrate its usage on different types of models and output properties. We present an overview of its applications, such as inferring and proving formal explanations of neural networks, compositional verification, run-time monitoring, repair, and others. We also show novel results highlighting its potential in the era of large vision-language models.

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Divya Gopinath, Corina S. Pasareanu, Muhammad Usman. 2026-05-08. Prophecy: Inferring Formal Properties from Neuron Activations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21677

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