Test Evaluation Verification and Validation

To provide assurance that AI-enabled systems will behave appropriately across the range of their operating conditions without performing exhaustive testing, the DoD will need to make inferences about system decision making. However, making these inferences validly requires understanding what causally drives system decision-making, which is not possible when systems are black boxes. In this briefing, we discuss the state of the art and gaps in techniques for obtaining, verifying, validating, and accrediting (OVVA) models of system decision-making....

The Department of Defense (DoD) has invested significant effort over the past decade considering the role of artificial intelligence and autonomy in national security (e.g., Defense Science Board, 2012, 2016, Deputy Secretary of Defense, 2012, Endsley, 2015, Executive Order No. 13859, 2019, US Department of Defense, 2011, 2019, Zacharias, 2019a). However, these efforts were broadly scoped and only partially touched on how the DoD will certify the safety and performance of these systems....