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Latent Regularization in Generative Test Input Generation

Software Engineering 2026-02-18 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of regularization of latent spaces through truncation on the quality of generated test inputs for deep learning classifiers. We evaluate this effect using style-based GANs, a state-of-the-art generative approach, and assess quality along three dimensions: validity, diversity, and fault detection. We evaluate our approach on the boundary testing of deep learning image classifiers across three datasets, MNIST, Fashion MNIST, and CIFAR-10. We compare two truncation strategies: latent code mixing with binary search optimization and random latent truncation for generative exploration. Our experiments show that the latent code-mixing approach yields a higher fault detection rate than random truncation, while also improving both diversity and validity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.15552,
  title  = {Latent Regularization in Generative Test Input Generation},
  author = {Giorgi Merabishvili and Oliver Weißl and Andrea Stocco},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.15552},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication at the 7th International Workshop on Deep Learning for Testing and Testing for Deep Learning (DeepTest 2026), co-located with ICSE 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:39:53.055Z