Black-Box Testing of Deep Neural Networks through Test Case Diversity
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been extensively used in many areas including image processing, medical diagnostics and autonomous driving. However, DNNs can exhibit erroneous behaviours that may lead to critical errors, especially when used in safety-critical systems. Inspired by testing techniques for traditional software systems, researchers have proposed neuron coverage criteria, as an analogy to source code coverage, to guide the testing of DNNs. Despite very active research on DNN coverage, several recent studies have questioned the usefulness of such criteria in guiding DNN testing. Further, from a practical standpoint, these criteria are white-box as they require access to the internals or training data of DNNs, which is often not feasible or convenient. Measuring such coverage requires executing DNNs with candidate inputs to guide testing, which is not an option in many practical contexts. In this paper, we investigate diversity metrics as an alternative to white-box coverage criteria. For the previously mentioned reasons, we require such metrics to be black-box and not rely on the execution and outputs of DNNs under test. To this end, we first select and adapt three diversity metrics and study, in a controlled manner, their capacity to measure actual diversity in input sets. We then analyze their statistical association with fault detection using four datasets and five DNNs. We further compare diversity with state-of-the-art white-box coverage criteria. As a mechanism to enable such analysis, we also propose a novel way to estimate fault detection in DNNs. Our experiments show that relying on the diversity of image features embedded in test input sets is a more reliable indicator than coverage criteria to effectively guide DNN testing. Indeed, we found that one of our selected black-box diversity metrics far outperforms existing coverage criteria in terms of fault-revealing capability and computational time. Results also confirm the suspicions that state-of-the-art coverage criteria are not adequate to guide the construction of test input sets to detect as many faults as possible using natural inputs.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it