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Main Authors: Attaoui, Mohammed, Pastore, Fabrizio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15953
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author Attaoui, Mohammed
Pastore, Fabrizio
author_facet Attaoui, Mohammed
Pastore, Fabrizio
contents The generation of synthetic inputs via simulators driven by search algorithms is essential for cost-effective testing of Deep Neural Network (DNN) components for safety-critical systems. However, in many applications, simulators are unable to produce the ground-truth data needed for automated test oracles and to guide the search process. To tackle this issue, we propose an approach for the generation of inputs for computer vision DNNs that integrates a generative network to ensure simulator fidelity and employs heuristic-based search fitnesses that leverage transformation consistency, noise resistance, surprise adequacy, and uncertainty estimation. We compare the performance of our fitnesses with that of a traditional fitness function leveraging ground truth; further, we assess how the integration of a GAN not leveraging the ground truth impacts on test and retraining effectiveness. Our results suggest that leveraging transformation consistency is the best option to generate inputs for both DNN testing and retraining; it maximizes input diversity, spots the inputs leading to worse DNN performance, and leads to best DNN performance after retraining. Besides enabling simulator-based testing in the absence of ground truth, our findings pave the way for testing solutions that replace costly simulators with diffusion and large language models, which might be more affordable than simulators, but cannot generate ground-truth data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_15953
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GAN-enhanced Simulation-driven DNN Testing in Absence of Ground Truth
Attaoui, Mohammed
Pastore, Fabrizio
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
The generation of synthetic inputs via simulators driven by search algorithms is essential for cost-effective testing of Deep Neural Network (DNN) components for safety-critical systems. However, in many applications, simulators are unable to produce the ground-truth data needed for automated test oracles and to guide the search process. To tackle this issue, we propose an approach for the generation of inputs for computer vision DNNs that integrates a generative network to ensure simulator fidelity and employs heuristic-based search fitnesses that leverage transformation consistency, noise resistance, surprise adequacy, and uncertainty estimation. We compare the performance of our fitnesses with that of a traditional fitness function leveraging ground truth; further, we assess how the integration of a GAN not leveraging the ground truth impacts on test and retraining effectiveness. Our results suggest that leveraging transformation consistency is the best option to generate inputs for both DNN testing and retraining; it maximizes input diversity, spots the inputs leading to worse DNN performance, and leads to best DNN performance after retraining. Besides enabling simulator-based testing in the absence of ground truth, our findings pave the way for testing solutions that replace costly simulators with diffusion and large language models, which might be more affordable than simulators, but cannot generate ground-truth data.
title GAN-enhanced Simulation-driven DNN Testing in Absence of Ground Truth
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15953