Predictive mutation analysis of test case prioritization for deep neural networks

Testing deep neural networks requires high-quality test cases, but using new test cases would incur the labor-intensive test case labeling issue in the test oracle problem. Test case prioritization for failure-revealing test cases alleviates the problem. Existing metric-based techniques analyze vector-based prediction outputs. They cannot handle regression models. Existing mutation-based techniques either remain ineffective or incur high computational costs. In this paper, we propose EffiMAP, an effective and efficient test case prioritization technique with predictive mutation analysis. In the test phase, without performing a comprehensive mutation analysis, EffiMAP predicts whether model mutants are killed by a test case by the information extracted from the execution trace of the test case. Our experiment shows that EffiMAP significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art technique in both effectiveness and efficiency in the test phase of handling test cases of both classification and regression models. This paper is the first work to show the feasibility of predictive mutation analysis to rank test cases with a higher probability of exposing model prediction failures in the domain of deep neural network testing. Copyright © 2022 IEEE.