ActGraph: prioritization of test cases based on deep neural network activation graph

Widespread applications of deep neural networks (DNNs) benefit from DNN testing to guarantee their quality. In the DNN testing, numerous test cases are fed into the model to explore potential vulnerabilities, but they require expensive manual cost to check the label. Therefore, test case prioritization is proposed to solve the problem of labeling cost, e.g., surprise adequacy-based, uncertainty quantifiers-based and mutation-based prioritization methods. However, most of them suffer from limited scenarios (i.e. high confidence adversarial or false positive cases) and high time complexity. To address these challenges, we propose the concept of the activation graph from the perspective of the spatial relationship of neurons. We observe that the activation graph of cases that triggers the model’s misbehavior significantly differs from that of normal cases. Motivated by it, we design a test case prioritization method based on the activation graph, ActGraph, by extracting the high-order node feature of the activation graph for prioritization. ActGraph explains the difference between the test cases to solve the problem of scenario limitation. Without mutation operations, ActGraph is easy to implement, leading to lower time complexity. Extensive experiments on three datasets and four models demonstrate that ActGraph has the following key characteristics. (i) Effectiveness and generalizability: ActGraph shows competitive performance in all of the natural, adversarial and mixed scenarios, especially in RAUC-100 improvement (\(\sim \times \)1.40). (ii) Efficiency: ActGraph runs at less time cost (\(\sim \times \)1/50) than the state-of-the-art method. The code of ActGraph is open-sourced at https://github.com/Embed-Debuger/ActGraph.