TestRank: Bringing Order into Unlabeled Test Instances for Deep Learning Tasks

Deep learning (DL) systems are notoriously difficult to test and debug due to the lack of correctness proof and the huge test input space to cover. Given the ubiquitous unlabeled test data and high labeling cost, in this paper, we propose a novel test prioritization technique, namely TestRank, which aims at revealing more model failures with less labeling effort. TestRank brings order into the unlabeled test data according to their likelihood of being a failure, i.e., their failure-revealing capabilities. Different from existing solutions, TestRank leverages both intrinsic and contextual attributes of the unlabeled test data when prioritizing them. To be specific, we first build a similarity graph on both unlabeled test samples and labeled samples (e.g., training or previously labeled test samples). Then, we conduct graph-based semi-supervised learning to extract contextual features from the correctness of similar labeled samples. For a particular test instance, the contextual features extracted with the graph neural network and the intrinsic features obtained with the DL model itself are combined to predict its failure-revealing capability. Finally, TestRank prioritizes unlabeled test inputs in descending order of the above probability value. We evaluate TestRank on three popular image classification datasets, and results show that TestRank significantly outperforms existing test prioritization techniques.