3 research outputs found
DiverGet: A Search-Based Software Testing Approach for Deep Neural Network Quantization Assessment
Quantization is one of the most applied Deep Neural Network (DNN) compression
strategies, when deploying a trained DNN model on an embedded system or a cell
phone. This is owing to its simplicity and adaptability to a wide range of
applications and circumstances, as opposed to specific Artificial Intelligence
(AI) accelerators and compilers that are often designed only for certain
specific hardware (e.g., Google Coral Edge TPU). With the growing demand for
quantization, ensuring the reliability of this strategy is becoming a critical
challenge. Traditional testing methods, which gather more and more genuine data
for better assessment, are often not practical because of the large size of the
input space and the high similarity between the original DNN and its quantized
counterpart. As a result, advanced assessment strategies have become of
paramount importance. In this paper, we present DiverGet, a search-based
testing framework for quantization assessment. DiverGet defines a space of
metamorphic relations that simulate naturally-occurring distortions on the
inputs. Then, it optimally explores these relations to reveal the disagreements
among DNNs of different arithmetic precision. We evaluate the performance of
DiverGet on state-of-the-art DNNs applied to hyperspectral remote sensing
images. We chose the remote sensing DNNs as they're being increasingly deployed
at the edge (e.g., high-lift drones) in critical domains like climate change
research and astronomy. Our results show that DiverGet successfully challenges
the robustness of established quantization techniques against
naturally-occurring shifted data, and outperforms its most recent concurrent,
DiffChaser, with a success rate that is (on average) four times higher.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Empirical Software Engineering
Journal (EMSE