TestRank: Bringing Order into Unlabeled Test Instances for Deep Learning Tasks

Deep Learning (DL) models have achieved unprecedented success in various tasks and are pervasively deployed in real-world applications. It is critical to guarantee their correctness by testing their behaviors. However, DL systems are notoriously difficult to test and debug due to the lack of explainability and the huge test input space to cover. Generally speaking, it is relatively easy to collect a massive amount of test data, but the labeling cost can be quite high. Consequently, it is essential to conduct test selection and label only those selected ‘high quality’ bug-revealing test inputs for test cost reduction. In this paper, we propose a novel test prioritization technique that brings order into the unlabeled test instances according to their bug-revealing capabilities, namely TestRank. Different from existing solutions, TestRank leverages both intrinsic attributes and contextual attributes of test instances when prioritizing them. To be specific, we first build a similarity graph on test instances and training samples, and we conduct graph-based semi-supervised learning to extract contextual features. Then, for a particular test instance, the contextual features extracted from the graph neural network (GNN) and the intrinsic features obtained with the DL model itself are combined to predict its bug-revealing probability. Finally, TestRank prioritizes unlabeled test instances in descending order of the above probability value. We evaluate the performance of TestRank on a variety of image classification datasets. Experimental results show that the debugging efficiency of our method significantly outperforms existing test prioritization techniques.