Papers › DeepMetis: Augmenting a Deep Learning Test Set to Increase its Mutation Score

DeepMetis: Augmenting a Deep Learning Test Set to Increase its Mutation Score

15 Sep 2021arXiv:2109.07514archive 2025-07-28

Vincenzo Riccio, Nargiz Humbatova, Gunel Jahangirova, Paolo Tonella

Deep Learning (DL) components are routinely integrated into software systems that need to perform complex tasks such as image or natural language processing. The adequacy of the test data used to test such systems can be assessed by their ability to expose artificially injected faults (mutations) that simulate real DL faults. In this paper, we describe an approach to automatically generate new test inputs that can be used to augment the existing test set so that its capability to detect DL mutations increases. Our tool DeepMetis implements a search based input generation strategy. To account for the non-determinism of the training and the mutation processes, our fitness function involves multiple instances of the DL model under test. Experimental results show that \tool is effective at augmenting the given test set, increasing its capability to detect mutants by 63% on average. A leave-one-out experiment shows that the augmented test set is capable of exposing unseen mutants, which simulate the occurrence of yet undetected faults.

PaperPDFCode

Code

testingautomated-usi/deepmetis officialmentioned in papertf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections