Accelerating Delta Debugging through Probabilistic Monotonicity Assessment

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Hauptverfasser: Tao, Yonggang, Xue, Jingling
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Tao, Yonggang
Xue, Jingling
author_facet Tao, Yonggang
Xue, Jingling
contents Delta debugging assumes search space monotonicity: if a program causes a failure, any supersets of that program will also induce the same failure, permitting the exclusion of subsets of non-failure-inducing programs. However, this assumption does not always hold in practice. This paper introduces Probabilistic Monotonicity Assessment (PMA), enhancing the efficiency of DDMIN-style algorithms without sacrificing effectiveness. PMA dynamically models and assesses the search space's monotonicity based on prior tests tried during the debugging process and uses a confidence function to quantify monotonicity, thereby enabling the probabilistic exclusion of subsets of non-failure-inducing programs. Our approach significantly reduces redundant tests that would otherwise be performed, without compromising the quality of the reduction. We evaluated PMA against two leading DDMIN-style tools, CHISEL and ProbDD. Our findings indicate that PMA cuts processing time by 59.2% compared to CHISEL, accelerates the reduction process (i.e., the number of tokens deleted per second) by 3.32x, and decreases the sizes of the final reduced programs by 6.7%. Against ProbDD, PMA reduces processing time by 22.0%, achieves a 1.34x speedup in the reduction process, and further decreases the sizes of the final reduced programs by 3.0%. These findings affirm PMA's role in significantly improving delta debugging's efficiency while maintaining or enhancing its effectiveness.
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Accelerating Delta Debugging through Probabilistic Monotonicity Assessment
Tao, Yonggang
Xue, Jingling
Software Engineering
Delta debugging assumes search space monotonicity: if a program causes a failure, any supersets of that program will also induce the same failure, permitting the exclusion of subsets of non-failure-inducing programs. However, this assumption does not always hold in practice. This paper introduces Probabilistic Monotonicity Assessment (PMA), enhancing the efficiency of DDMIN-style algorithms without sacrificing effectiveness. PMA dynamically models and assesses the search space's monotonicity based on prior tests tried during the debugging process and uses a confidence function to quantify monotonicity, thereby enabling the probabilistic exclusion of subsets of non-failure-inducing programs. Our approach significantly reduces redundant tests that would otherwise be performed, without compromising the quality of the reduction. We evaluated PMA against two leading DDMIN-style tools, CHISEL and ProbDD. Our findings indicate that PMA cuts processing time by 59.2% compared to CHISEL, accelerates the reduction process (i.e., the number of tokens deleted per second) by 3.32x, and decreases the sizes of the final reduced programs by 6.7%. Against ProbDD, PMA reduces processing time by 22.0%, achieves a 1.34x speedup in the reduction process, and further decreases the sizes of the final reduced programs by 3.0%. These findings affirm PMA's role in significantly improving delta debugging's efficiency while maintaining or enhancing its effectiveness.
title Accelerating Delta Debugging through Probabilistic Monotonicity Assessment
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11614