Related papers: An Empirical Study of the Realism of Mutants in De…

Deep learning (DL) defines a new data-driven programming paradigm where the internal system logic is largely shaped by the training data. The standard way of evaluating DL models is to examine their performance on a test dataset. The…

Mutation testing is a well-established technique for assessing a test suite's quality by injecting artificial faults into production code. In recent years, mutation testing has been extended to machine learning (ML) systems, and deep…

Mutants support testing and debugging in two roles: (i) as test goals and (ii) as substitutes for real faults. Hard-to-kill mutants provide better guidance for test improvement, while realism is essential when mutants are used to simulate…

Testing Deep Learning (DL) systems is a complex task as they do not behave like traditional systems would, notably because of their stochastic nature. Nonetheless, being able to adapt existing testing techniques such as Mutation Testing…

Context: Mutation Testing (MT) is an important tool in traditional Software Engineering (SE) white-box testing. It aims to artificially inject faults in a system to evaluate a test suite's capability to detect them, assuming that the test…

Mutation testing can be used to assess the fault-detection capabilities of a given test suite. To this aim, two characteristics of mutation testing frameworks are of paramount importance: (i) they should generate mutants that are…

Rapid adoptions of Deep Learning (DL) in a broad range of fields led to the development of specialised testing techniques for DL systems, including DL mutation testing. However, existing post-training DL mutation techniques often generate…

Mutation testing has been widely accepted as an approach to guide test case generation or to assess the effectiveness of test suites. Empirical studies have shown that mutants are representative of real faults; yet they also indicated a…

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…

Mutation analysis measures test suite adequacy, the degree to which a test suite detects seeded faults: one test suite is better than another if it detects more mutants. Mutation analysis effectiveness rests on the assumption that mutants…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly adopted to train agents that can deal with complex sequential tasks, such as driving an autonomous vehicle or controlling a humanoid robot. Correspondingly, novel approaches are needed to ensure…

Deep Learning (DL) frameworks are a fundamental component of DL development. Therefore, the detection of DL framework defects is important and challenging. As one of the most widely adopted DL testing techniques, model mutation has recently…

Mutation analysis is one of the most effective, but costly means of assessing the ability of software test suites to prevent bugs. Traditional mutation analysis involves producing and evaluating syntactic variants of the original to check…

Deep neural network (DNN) mutation analysis is a promising approach to evaluating test set adequacy. Due to the large number of generated mutants that must be tested on large datasets, mutation analysis is costly. In this paper, we present…

We propose a new test case prioritization technique that combines both mutation-based and diversity-based approaches. Our diversity-aware mutation-based technique relies on the notion of mutant distinguishment, which aims to distinguish one…

Mutation analysis assesses a test suite's adequacy by measuring its ability to detect small artificial faults, systematically seeded into the tested program. Mutation analysis is considered one of the strongest test-adequacy criteria.…

Mutation analysis of deep neural networks (DNNs) is a promising method for effective evaluation of test data quality and model robustness, but it can be computationally expensive, especially for large models. To alleviate this, we present…

Generative deep learning (DL) models have been successfully adopted for vulnerability patching. However, such models require the availability of a large dataset of patches to learn from. To overcome this issue, researchers have proposed to…

Quantum machine learning integrates the strengths of quantum computing and machine learning, enabling models to learn complex features using fewer parameters than their classical counterparts. Due to the increasing complexity of quantum…

As developers increasingly rely on LLM-generated code summaries for documentation, testing, and review, it is important to study whether these summaries accurately reflect what the program actually does. LLMs often produce confident…