Practical Accuracy Estimation for Efficient Deep Neural Network Testing

AbstractDeep neural network (DNN) has become increasingly popular and DNN testing is very critical to guarantee the correctness of DNN, i.e., the accuracy of DNN in this work. However, DNN testing suffers from a serious efficiency problem, i.e., it is costly to label each test input to know the DNN accuracy for the testing set, since labeling each test input involves multiple persons (even with domain-specific knowledge) in a manual way and the testing set is large-scale. To relieve this problem, we propose a novel and practical approach, called PACE (which is short for Practical ACcuracy Estimation), which selects a small set of test inputs that can precisely estimate the accuracy of the whole testing set. In this way, the labeling costs can be largely reduced by just labeling this small set of selected test inputs. Besides achieving a precise accuracy estimation, to make PACE more practical it is also required that it is interpretable, deterministic, and as efficient as possible. Therefore, PACE first incorporates clustering to interpretably divide test inputs with different testing capabilities (i.e., testing different functionalities of a DNN model) into different groups. Then, PACE utilizes the MMD-critic algorithm, a state-of-the-art example-based explanation algorithm, to select prototypes (i.e., the most representative test inputs) from each group, according to the group sizes, which can reduce the impact of noise due to clustering. Meanwhile, PACE also borrows the idea of adaptive random testing to select test inputs from the minority space (i.e., the test inputs that are not clustered into any group) to achieve great diversity under the required number of test inputs. The two parallel selection processes (i.e., selection from both groups and the minority space) compose the final small set of selected test inputs. We conducted an extensive study to evaluate the performance of PACE based on a comprehensive benchmark (i.e., 24 pairs of DNN models and testing sets) by considering different types of models (i.e., classification and regression models, high-accuracy and low-accuracy models, and CNN and RNN models) and different types of test inputs (i.e., original, mutated, and automatically generated test inputs). The results demonstrate that PACE is able to precisely estimate the accuracy of the whole testing set with only 1.181%∼2.302% deviations, on average, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art approaches.