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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chu, Ya-Chi, Boukas, Alkiviades, Udell, Madeleine
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09317
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author Chu, Ya-Chi
Boukas, Alkiviades
Udell, Madeleine
author_facet Chu, Ya-Chi
Boukas, Alkiviades
Udell, Madeleine
contents Neural networks are increasingly used as fast surrogate models across various domains, but unconstrained predictions can violate physical, operational, or safety requirements. We propose SnareNet, a feasibility-controlled architecture to learn mappings whose outputs must satisfy input-dependent constraints. SnareNet appends a differentiable repair layer that navigates in the constraint map's range space, steering iterates toward feasibility and producing a repaired output that satisfies constraints to a user-specified tolerance. We stabilize end-to-end training by adaptive relaxation, a new training paradigm that snares the neural network at initialization and shrinks it into the feasible set, enabling early exploration and strict feasibility later in training. On optimization learning and trajectory planning benchmarks, SnareNet consistently attains improved objective quality while satisfying constraints more reliably than prior work, and it is the first to enforce non-convex constraints at medium-to-high precision robustly across instances.
format Preprint
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SnareNet: Flexible Repair Layers for Neural Networks with Hard Constraints
Chu, Ya-Chi
Boukas, Alkiviades
Udell, Madeleine
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neural networks are increasingly used as fast surrogate models across various domains, but unconstrained predictions can violate physical, operational, or safety requirements. We propose SnareNet, a feasibility-controlled architecture to learn mappings whose outputs must satisfy input-dependent constraints. SnareNet appends a differentiable repair layer that navigates in the constraint map's range space, steering iterates toward feasibility and producing a repaired output that satisfies constraints to a user-specified tolerance. We stabilize end-to-end training by adaptive relaxation, a new training paradigm that snares the neural network at initialization and shrinks it into the feasible set, enabling early exploration and strict feasibility later in training. On optimization learning and trajectory planning benchmarks, SnareNet consistently attains improved objective quality while satisfying constraints more reliably than prior work, and it is the first to enforce non-convex constraints at medium-to-high precision robustly across instances.
title SnareNet: Flexible Repair Layers for Neural Networks with Hard Constraints
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09317