arXiv subjects

Ali Ghanbari

Publications and source records attributed to Ali Ghanbari.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

ADEPT: A Unified Framework for Deep Learning Test Adequacy

Over the past decade, many test adequacy metrics have been proposed for deep learning that characterize test dataset adequacy from different perspectives, e.g., neuron activation behavior, latent feature coverage, decision-boundary exploration, etc. However, these metrics are typically released as independent research prototypes with substantially different installation and preprocessing requirements, execution workflows, and configuration mechanisms. These complications make them quite difficult to reproduce, compare, and adopt in research work and practical deployment alike. In this paper, we present the engineering details of ADEPT, a framework that integrates representative adequacy techniques, including neuron-coverage-based metrics, surprise adequacy, input distribution coverage, boundary coverage, and source- and model-level mutation score, under a consistent execution workflow. ADEPT provides a template-based metric interface with well-defined extension points for integrating new adequacy metrics. Furthermore, it provides YAML-based configuration management, preprocessing-cache reuse, and structured result reporting, making it easy to use in any research and development workflows. ADEPT is designed for researchers and practitioners who wish to reproduce and apply adequacy metrics without spending days or weeks implementing missing tooling or configuring disparate research prototypes. A demo video is available at https://aub.ie/ADEPT_video.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Provably Lossless Acceleration of DNN Mutation Testing via Memoization

Mutation analysis has recently reemerged in the context of deep neural networks (DNNs) as a promising, but notoriously costly, approach for assessing test dataset adequacy. Existing techniques speed up DNN mutation testing through lossy approximations that trade efficiency for mutation score accuracy. This paper introduces Mure, the first provably lossless framework for accelerating DNN mutation testing via memoization. Mure is based on the idea that DNN mutants and the original model share substantial redundant computation, so during mutation testing, it executes only the mutated suffixes of each mutant and reuses the common prefix from the original model, which is computed only once. We give a formal account of memoized mutation testing, and prove that Mure is sound, i.e., it produces results equivalent to exhaustive vanilla mutation testing, and identify basic conditions under which speed-up is guaranteed. We have implemented Mure and evaluated it on 15 DNN models of various architectures, complexities, and sizes ranging from a few thousands to millions of parameters. This provides empirical evidence that Mure reduces the computational cost of mutation testing by 44.54%, on average. We also observed that while state-of-the-art techniques tend to yield higher acceleration (up to 88.97%, on average), they come at the cost of some error in mutation score. We further analyze the effect of mutation generation selection ratio on the effectiveness of Mure and observed predictable reductions in memoization opportunities with increasing the percentage of mutated neurons. We observed that Mure offers more than 20% speed-up even when as high as 5% of the neurons are mutated.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Using Fourier Analysis and Mutant Clustering to Accelerate DNN Mutation Testing

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 a technique, named DM#, for accelerating DNN mutation testing using Fourier analysis. The key insight is that DNN outputs are real-valued functions suitable for Fourier analysis that can be leveraged to quantify mutant behavior using only a few data points. DM# uses the quantified mutant behavior to cluster the mutants so that the ones with similar behavior fall into the same group. A representative from each group is then selected for testing, and the result of the test, e.g., whether the mutant is killed or survived, is reused for all other mutants represented by the selected mutant, obviating the need for testing other mutants. 14 DNN models of sizes ranging from thousands to millions of parameters, trained on different datasets, are used to evaluate DM# and compare it to several baseline techniques. Our results provide empirical evidence on the effectiveness of DM# in accelerating mutation testing by 28.38%, on average, at the average cost of only 0.72% error in mutation score. Moreover, on average, DM# incurs 11.78, 15.16, and 114.36 times less mutation score error compared to random mutant selection, boundary sample selection, and random sample selection techniques, respectively, while generally offering comparable speed-up.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Automatic Goal Clone Detection in Rocq

Proof engineering in Rocq is a labor-intensive process, and as proof developments grow in size, redundancy and maintainability become challenges. One such redundancy is goal cloning, i.e., proving {\alpha}-equivalent goals multiple times, leading to wasted effort and bloated proof scripts. In this paper, we introduce clone-finder, a novel technique for detecting goal clones in Rocq proofs. By leveraging the formal notion of {\alpha}-equivalence for Gallina terms, clone-finder systematically identifies duplicated proof goals across large Rocq codebases. We evaluate clone-finder on 40 real-world Rocq projects from the CoqGym dataset. Our results reveal that each project contains an average of 27.73 instances of goal clone. We observed that the clones can be categorized as either exact goal duplication, generalization, or {\alpha}-equivalent goals with different proofs, each signifying varying levels duplicate effort. Our findings highlight significant untapped potential for proof reuse in Rocq-based formal verification projects, paving the way for future improvements in automated proof engineering.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2025

On Accelerating Deep Neural Network Mutation Analysis by Neuron and Mutant Clustering

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 DEEPMAACC, a technique and a tool that speeds up DNN mutation analysis through neuron and mutant clustering. DEEPMAACC implements two methods: (1) neuron clustering to reduce the number of generated mutants and (2) mutant clustering to reduce the number of mutants to be tested by selecting representative mutants for testing. Both use hierarchical agglomerative clustering to group neurons and mutants with similar weights, with the goal of improving efficiency while maintaining mutation score. DEEPMAACC has been evaluated on 8 DNN models across 4 popular classification datasets and two DNN architectures. When compared to exhaustive, or vanilla, mutation analysis, the results provide empirical evidence that neuron clustering approach, on average, accelerates mutation analysis by 69.77%, with an average -26.84% error in mutation score. Meanwhile, mutant clustering approach, on average, accelerates mutation analysis by 35.31%, with an average 1.96% error in mutation score. Our results demonstrate that a trade-off can be made between mutation testing speed and mutation score error.

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arXiv2023

Mutation-based Fault Localization of Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are susceptible to bugs, just like other types of software systems. A significant uptick in using DNN, and its applications in wide-ranging areas, including safety-critical systems, warrant extensive research on software engineering tools for improving the reliability of DNN-based systems. One such tool that has gained significant attention in the recent years is DNN fault localization. This paper revisits mutation-based fault localization in the context of DNN models and proposes a novel technique, named deepmufl, applicable to a wide range of DNN models. We have implemented deepmufl and have evaluated its effectiveness using 109 bugs obtained from StackOverflow. Our results show that deepmufl detects 53/109 of the bugs by ranking the buggy layer in top-1 position, outperforming state-of-the-art static and dynamic DNN fault localization systems that are also designed to target the class of bugs supported by deepmufl. Moreover, we observed that we can halve the fault localization time for a pre-trained model using mutation selection, yet losing only 7.55% of the bugs localized in top-1 position.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

A Review of Space Tribology Experiments in Low Earth Orbit: Challenges and Opportunities

Operating mechanical devices in low earth orbit (LEO) environment presents unique challenges due to adverse effects of the LEO environment on lubricants and materials in tribo-mechanisms. These challenges include corrosion due to atomic oxygen, molecular degradation of materials and fluids due to radiation, temperature extremes influencing lubricant viscosity, and rapid evaporative loss of fluids in vacuum conditions. Therefore, lubricants for mechanisms and components such as bearings and gears for spacecraft should be tested extensively in both air and vacuum to ensure their continuous and accurate function. Literature on ground based tribo-testing is extensive and well-established. However, tribological investigations conducted in LEO are much fewer in number. The purpose of this paper is to draw together details of tribology experiments of this type, to try to clarify their purpose and value. This review presents these studies according to a thematic categorization of the mechanisms involved.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2021

Toward Speeding up Mutation Analysis by Memoizing Expensive Methods

Mutation analysis has many applications, such as assessing the quality of test cases, fault localization, test input generation, security analysis, etc. Such applications involve running test suite against a large number of program mutants leading to poor scalability. Much research has been aimed at speeding up this process, focusing on reducing the number of mutants, the number of executed tests, or the execution time of the mutants. This paper presents a novel approach, named MeMu, for reducing the execution time of the mutants, by memoizing the most expensive methods in the system. Memoization is an optimization technique that allows bypassing the execution of expensive methods, when repeated inputs are detected. MeMu can be used in conjunction with existing acceleration techniques. We implemented MeMu on top of PITest, a well-known JVM bytecode-level mutation analysis system, and obtained, on average, an 18.15% speed-up over PITest, in the execution time of the mutants for 12 real-world programs. These promising results and the fact that MeMu could also be used for other applications that involve repeated execution of tests (e.g., automatic program repair and regression testing), strongly support future research for improving its efficiency.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

PRF: A Framework for Building Automatic Program Repair Prototypes for JVM-Based Languages

PRF is a Java-based framework that allows researchers to build prototypes of test-based generate-and-validate automatic program repair techniques for JVM languages by simply extending it with their patch generation plugins. The framework also provides other useful components for constructing automatic program repair tools, e.g., a fault localization component that provides spectrum-based fault localization information at different levels of granularity, a configurable and safe patch validation component that is 11+X faster than vanilla testing, and a customizable post-processing component to generate fix reports. A demo video of PRF is available at https://bit.ly/3ehduSS.

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arXiv2020

Validation of Automatically Generated Patches: An Appetizer

In the context of test case based automated program repair (APR), the research community call the patches that pass all the test cases but fail to actually fix the bug test case overfitted patches. Currently, overfitted patches has to be manually inspected by the users. Being a labor intensive activity that hinders widespread adoption of APR tools, automatic validation of APR-generated patches has been the topic of research in recent years. In this paper, we point out the limitations of the existing techniques/methodologies that call for further research, and introduce two promising directions toward effective automatic patch validation: (1) motivated by the relative effectiveness of anti-patterns, we propose to use statistical techniques to avoid the uncomputability of applying some of the anti-pattern rules and automate the technique. Our results show that we achieve at least 57% precision. (2) We present a proposal for a semi-automatic technique that helps the programmers in finding properties of the patched methods and stress testing the patches based on those properties so as to filter out overfitted ones as many as possible.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

ObjSim: Lightweight Automatic Patch Prioritization via Object Similarity

In the context of test case based automatic program repair (APR), patches that pass all the test cases but fail to fix the bug are called overfitted patches. Currently, patches generated by APR tools get inspected manually by the users to find and adopt genuine fixes. Being a laborious activity hindering widespread adoption of APR, automatic identification of overfitted patches has lately been the topic of active research. This paper presents engineering details of ObjSim: a fully automatic, lightweight similarity-based patch prioritization tool for JVM-based languages. The tool works by comparing the system state at the exit point(s) of patched method before and after patching and prioritizing patches that result in state that is more similar to that of original, unpatched version on passing tests while less similar on failing ones. Our experiments with patches generated by the recent APR tool PraPR for fixable bugs from Defects4J v1.4.0 show that ObjSim prioritizes 16.67% more genuine fixes in top-1 place. A demo video of the tool is located at https://bit.ly/2K8gnYV.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2019

Can Automated Program Repair Refine Fault Localization?

Software bugs are prevalent in modern software systems and notoriously hard to debug manually. Therefore, a large body of research efforts have been dedicated to automated software debugging, including both automated fault localization and program repair. However, the existing fault localization techniques are usually ineffective on real-world software systems while even the most advanced program repair techniques can only fix a small ratio of real-world bugs. Although fault localization and program repair are inherently connected, we observe that in the literature their only connection is that program repair techniques usually use off-the-shelf fault localization techniques (e.g., Ochiai) to determine the potential candidate statements/elements for patching. In this work, we explore their connection in the other direction, i.e., can program repair in turn help with fault localization? In this way,we not only open a new dimension for more powerful fault localization, but also extend the application scope of program repair to all possible bugs (not only the bugs that can be directly automatically fixed).We have designed ProFL, a simplistic approach using patch-execution results (from program repair) as the feedback information for fault localization. The experimental results on the widely used Defects4J benchmark show that the basic ProFL can already localize 161 of the 395 studied bugs within Top-1, while state-of-the-art spectrum and mutation based fault localization techniques at most localize 117 within Top-1. We also demonstrate ProFL's effectiveness under different settings. Lastly, we show that ProFL can further boost state-of-the-art fault localization via both unsupervised and supervised learning.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2018

Practical Program Repair via Bytecode Mutation

Software debugging is tedious, time-consuming, and even error-prone by itself. So, various automated debugging techniques have been proposed in the literature to facilitate the debugging process. Automated Program Repair (APR) is one of the most recent advances in automated debugging, and can directly produce patches for buggy programs with minimal human intervention. Although various advanced APR techniques (including those that are either search-based or semantic-based) have been proposed, the simplistic mutation-based APR technique, which simply uses pre-defined mutation operators (e.g., changing a>=b into a>b) to mutate programs for finding patches, has not yet been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we implement the first practical bytecode-level APR technique, PraPR, and present the first extensive study on fixing real-world bugs (e.g., Defects4J bugs) using bytecode mutation. The experimental results show that surprisingly even PraPR with only the basic traditional mutators can produce genuine patches for 18 bugs. Furthermore, with our augmented mutators, PraPR is able to produce genuine patches for 43 bugs, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art APR. It is also an order of magnitude faster, indicating a promising future for bytecode-mutation-based APR.

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