The Impact of Environment Configurations on the Stability of AI-Enabled Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Rahman, Musfiqur, Khatoonabadi, SayedHassan, Abdellatif, Ahmad, Samaana, Haya, Shihab, Emad
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Rahman, Musfiqur
Khatoonabadi, SayedHassan
Abdellatif, Ahmad
Samaana, Haya
Shihab, Emad
author_facet Rahman, Musfiqur
Khatoonabadi, SayedHassan
Abdellatif, Ahmad
Samaana, Haya
Shihab, Emad
contents Nowadays, software systems tend to include Artificial Intelligence (AI) components. Changes in the operational environment have been known to negatively impact the stability of AI-enabled software systems by causing unintended changes in behavior. However, how an environment configuration impacts the behavior of such systems has yet to be explored. Understanding and quantifying the degree of instability caused by different environment settings can help practitioners decide the best environment configuration for the most stable AI systems. To achieve this goal, we performed experiments with eight different combinations of three key environment variables (operating system, Python version, and CPU architecture) on $30$ open-source AI-enabled systems using the Travis CI platform. We determine the existence and the degree of instability introduced by each configuration using three metrics: the output of an AI component of the system (model performance), the time required to build and run the system (processing time), and the cost associated with building and running the system (expense). Our results indicate that changes in environment configurations lead to instability across all three metrics; however, it is observed more frequently with respect to processing time and expense rather than model performance. For example, between Linux and MacOS, instability is observed in 23\%, 96.67\%, and 100\% of the studied projects in model performance, processing time, and expense, respectively. Our findings underscore the importance of identifying the optimal combination of configuration settings to mitigate drops in model performance and reduce the processing time and expense before deploying an AI-enabled system.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_02825
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Impact of Environment Configurations on the Stability of AI-Enabled Systems
Rahman, Musfiqur
Khatoonabadi, SayedHassan
Abdellatif, Ahmad
Samaana, Haya
Shihab, Emad
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Nowadays, software systems tend to include Artificial Intelligence (AI) components. Changes in the operational environment have been known to negatively impact the stability of AI-enabled software systems by causing unintended changes in behavior. However, how an environment configuration impacts the behavior of such systems has yet to be explored. Understanding and quantifying the degree of instability caused by different environment settings can help practitioners decide the best environment configuration for the most stable AI systems. To achieve this goal, we performed experiments with eight different combinations of three key environment variables (operating system, Python version, and CPU architecture) on $30$ open-source AI-enabled systems using the Travis CI platform. We determine the existence and the degree of instability introduced by each configuration using three metrics: the output of an AI component of the system (model performance), the time required to build and run the system (processing time), and the cost associated with building and running the system (expense). Our results indicate that changes in environment configurations lead to instability across all three metrics; however, it is observed more frequently with respect to processing time and expense rather than model performance. For example, between Linux and MacOS, instability is observed in 23\%, 96.67\%, and 100\% of the studied projects in model performance, processing time, and expense, respectively. Our findings underscore the importance of identifying the optimal combination of configuration settings to mitigate drops in model performance and reduce the processing time and expense before deploying an AI-enabled system.
title The Impact of Environment Configurations on the Stability of AI-Enabled Systems
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02825