Verifying robustness of neural networks given a specified threat model is a
fundamental yet challenging task. While current verification methods mainly
focus on the $\ell_p$-norm threat model of the input instances, robustness
verification against semantic adversarial attacks inducing large $\ell_p$-norm
perturbations, such as color shifting and lighting adjustment, are beyond their
capacity. To bridge this gap, we propose \textit{Semantify-NN}, a
model-agnostic and generic robustness verification approach against semantic
perturbations for neural networks. By simply inserting our proposed
\textit{semantic perturbation layers} (SP-layers) to the input layer of any
given model, \textit{Semantify-NN} is model-agnostic, and any $\ell_p$-norm
based verification tools can be used to verify the model robustness against
semantic perturbations. We illustrate the principles of designing the SP-layers
and provide examples including semantic perturbations to image classification
in the space of hue, saturation, lightness, brightness, contrast and rotation,
respectively. In addition, an efficient refinement technique is proposed to
further significantly improve the semantic certificate. Experiments on various
network architectures and different datasets demonstrate the superior
verification performance of \textit{Semantify-NN} over $\ell_p$-norm-based
verification frameworks that naively convert semantic perturbation to
$\ell_p$-norm. The results show that \textit{Semantify-NN} can support
robustness verification against a wide range of semantic perturbations.
Code available https://github.com/JeetMo/Semantify-NN