Machine Learning with Requirements: a Manifesto

Abstract: In the recent years, machine learning has made great advancements that have been at the root of many breakthroughs in different application domains. However, it is still an open issue how make them applicable to high-stakes or safety-critical application domains, as they can often be brittle and unreliable. In this paper, we argue that requirements definition and satisfaction can go a long way to make machine learning models even more fitting to the real world, especially in critical domains. To this end, we present two problems in which (i) requirements arise naturally, (ii) machine learning models are or can be fruitfully deployed, and (iii) neglecting the requirements can have dramatic consequences. We show how the requirements specification can be fruitfully integrated into the standard machine learning development pipeline, proposing a novel pyramid development process in which requirements definition may impact all the subsequent phases in the pipeline, and viceversa.