AuthorsH. Spieker and A. Gotlieb
TitleAdaptive Metamorphic Testing with Contextual Bandits
AfilliationSoftware Engineering
Project(s)The Certus Centre (SFI), Department of Validation Intelligence for Autonomous Software Systems, Testing of Learning Robots (T-LARGO) , Testing of Learning Robots (T-Largo)
StatusPublished
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2020
JournalJournal of Systems and Software
Volume165
Date Published07/2020
PublisherElsevier
Other NumbersarXiv:1910.00262
Abstract

Metamorphic Testing is a software testing paradigm which aims at using necessary properties of a system-under-test, called metamorphic relations, to either check its expected outputs, or to generate new test cases. Metamorphic Testing has been successful to test programs for which a full oracle is not available or to test programs for which there are uncertainties on expected outputs such as learning systems. In this article, we propose Adaptive Metamorphic Testing as a generalization of a simple yet powerful reinforcement learning technique, namely contextual bandits, to select one of the multiple metamorphic relations available for a program. By using contextual bandits, Adaptive Metamorphic Testing learns which metamorphic relations are likely to transform a source test case, such that it has higher chance to discover faults. We present experimental results over two major case studies in machine learning, namely image classification and object detection, and identify weaknesses and robustness boundaries. Adaptive Metamorphic Testing efficiently identifies weaknesses of the tested systems in context of the source test case.

DOI10.1016/j.jss.2020.110574
Citation Key27259

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