Reflections on Surrogate-Assisted Search-Based Testing: A Taxonomy and Two Replication Studies based on Industrial ADAS and Simulink Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Surrogate-assisted search-based testing (SA-SBT) aims to reduce the computational time for testing compute-intensive systems. Surrogates enhance testing techniques by improving test case generation focusing the testing budget on the most critical portions of the input domain. In addition, they can serve as approximations of the system under test (SUT) to predict tests' results instead of executing the tests on compute-intensive SUTs. This article reflects on the existing SA-SBT techniques, particularly those applied to system-level testing and often facilitated using simulators or complex test beds. Our objective is to synthesize different heuristic algorithms and evaluation methods employed in existing SA-SBT techniques and present a comprehensive view of SA-SBT solutions. In addition, by critically reviewing our previous work on SA-SBT, we aim to identify the limitations in our proposed algorithms and evaluation methods and to propose potential improvements. We present a taxonomy that categorizes and contrasts existing SA-SBT solutions and highlights key research gaps. To identify the evaluation challenges, we conduct two replication studies of our past SA-SBT solutions: One study uses industrial advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) and the other relies on a Simulink model benchmark. We compare our results with those of the original studies and identify the difficulties in evaluating SA-SBT techniques, including the impact of different contextual factors on results generalization and the validity of our evaluation metrics. Based on our taxonomy and replication studies, we propose future research directions, including re-considerations in the current evaluation metrics used for SA-SBT solutions, utilizing surrogates for fault localization and repair in addition to testing, and creating frameworks for large-scale experiments by applying SA-SBT to multiple SUTs and simulators.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.049 | 0.126 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".