Distance-Aware Test Input Selection for Deep Neural Networks

Deep Neural Network (DNN) testing is one of the common practices to guarantee the quality of DNNs. However, DNN testing in general requires a significant amount of test inputs with oracle information (labels), which can be challenging and resource-intensive to obtain. To relieve this problem, we propose DATIS, a distance-aware test input selection approach for DNNs. Specifically, DATIS adopts a two-step approach for selecting test inputs. In the first step, it selects test inputs based on improved uncertainty scores derived from the distances between the test inputs and their nearest neighbor training samples. In the second step, it further eliminates test inputs that may cover the same faults by examining the distances among the selected test inputs. To evaluate DATIS, we conduct extensive experiments on 8 diverse subjects, taking into account different domains of test inputs, varied DNN structures, and diverse types of test inputs. Evaluation results show that DATIS significantly outperforms 15 baseline approaches in both selecting test inputs with high fault-revealing power and guiding the selection of data for DNN enhancement.