Coverage Guided Differential Adversarial Testing of Deep Learning Systems

Deep learning is increasingly applied to safety-critical application domains such as autonomous cars and medical devices. It is of significant importance to ensure their reliability and robustness. In this paper, we propose DLFuzz, the coverage guided differential adversarial testing framework to guide deep learing systems exposing incorrect behaviors. DLFuzz keeps minutely mutating the input to maximize the neuron coverage and the prediction difference between the original input and the mutated input, without manual labeling effort or cross-referencing oracles from other systems with the same functionality. We also design multiple novel strategies for neuron selection to improve the neuron coverage. The incorrect behaviors obtained by DLFuzz are then exploited for retraining and improving the dependability of the models. We present empirical evaluations on two well-known data-sets to demonstrate its effectiveness. Compared with DeepXplore, the state-of-the-art deep learning white-box testing framework, DLFuzz does not require extra efforts to find similar functional deep learning systems for cross-referencing check. But DLFuzz could generate
$338.59\%$
more adversarial inputs with
$89.82\%$
smaller perturbations, while maintaining the identities of the original inputs. DLFuzz also managed to averagely obtain
$2.86\%$
higher neuron coverage, and save
$20.11\%$
time consumption with respect to DeepXplore. We then evaluate the effectiveness of strategies for neuron selection, and demonstrated that all these strategies perform better than DeepXplore. Finally, DLFuzz proved to be able to improve the accuracy of deep learning systems by incorporating these adversarial inputs to retrain.