Communications of the ACM
DeepXplore: Automated Whitebox Testing of Deep Learning Systems
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Deep learning (DL) systems are increasingly deployed in safety- and security-critical domains such as self-driving cars and malware detection, where the correctness and predictability of a system's behavior for corner case inputs are of great importance. Existing DL testing depends heavily on manually labeled data and therefore often fails to expose erroneous behaviors for rare inputs.
We design, implement, and evaluate DeepXplore, the first white-box framework for systematically testing real-world DL systems. First, we introduce neuron coverage for measuring the parts of a DL system exercised by test inputs. Next, we leverage multiple DL systems with similar functionality as cross-referencing oracles to avoid manual checking. Finally, we demonstrate how finding inputs for DL systems that both trigger many differential behaviors and achieve high neuron coverage can be represented as a joint optimization problem and solved efficiently using gradient-based search techniques.
DeepXplore efficiently finds thousands of incorrect corner case behaviors (e.g., self-driving cars crashing into guard rails and malware masquerading as benign software) in state-of-the-art DL models with thousands of neurons trained on five popular datasets such as ImageNet and Udacity self-driving challenge data. For all tested DL models, on average, DeepXplore generated one test input demonstrating incorrect behavior within one second while running only on a commodity laptop. We further show that the test inputs generated by DeepXplore can also be used to retrain the corresponding DL model to improve the model's accuracy by up to 3%.
1. Introduction
Over the past few years, Deep Learning (DL) has made tremendous progress, achieving or surpassing human-level performance for a diverse set of tasks in many application domains. These advances have led to widespread adoption and deployment of DL in security- and safety-critical systems such as self-driving cars,1 malware detection,4 and aircraft collision avoidance systems.6
This wide adoption of DL techniques presents new challenges as the predictability and correctness of such systems are of crucial importance. Unfortunately, DL systems, despite their impressive capabilities, often demonstrate unexpected or incorrect behaviors in corner cases for several reasons such as biased training data and overfitting of the models. In safety- and security-critical settings, such incorrect behaviors can lead to disastrous consequences such as a fatal collision of a self-driving car. For example, a Google self-driving car recently crashed into a bus because it expected the bus to yield under a set of rare conditions but the bus did not.a
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