Abstract Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are being deployed in a wide range of settings today, from safety-critical applications like autonomous driving to commercial applications involving image classifications. However, recent research has shown that DNNs can be brittle to even slight variations of the input data. Therefore, rigorous testing of DNNs has gained widespread attention. While DNN robustness under norm-bound perturbation got significant attention over the past few years, our knowledge is still limited when natural variants of the input images come. These natural variants, e.g., a rotated or a rainy version of the original input, are especially concerning as they can occur naturally in the field without any active adversary and may lead to undesirable consequences. Thus, it is important to identify the inputs whose small variations may lead to erroneous DNN behaviors. The very few studies that looked at DNN’s robustness under natural variants, however, focus on estimating the overall robustness of DNNs across all the test data rather than localizing such error-producing points. This work aims to bridge this gap. To this end, we study the local per-input robustness properties of the DNNs and leverage those properties to build a white-box (DeepRobust-W) and a black-box (DeepRobust-B) tool to automatically identify the non-robust points. Our evaluation of these methods on three DNN models spanning three widely used image classification datasets shows that they are effective in flagging points of poor robustness. In particular, DeepRobust-W and DeepRobust-B are able to achieve an F1 score of up to 91.4% and 99.1%, respectively. We further show that DeepRobust-W can be applied to a regression problem in a domain beyond image classification. Our evaluation on three self-driving car models demonstrates that DeepRobust-W is effective in identifying points of poor robustness with F1 score up to 78.9%.

Code prediction, more specifically autocomplete, has become an essential feature in modern IDEs. Autocomplete is more effective when the desired next token is at (or close to) the top of the list of potential completions offered by the IDE at cursor position. This is where the strength of the underlying machine learning system that produces a ranked order of potential completions comes into play. We advance the state-of-the-art in the accuracy of code prediction (next token prediction) used in autocomplete systems. Our work uses Transformers as the base neural architecture. We show that by making the Transformer architecture aware of the syntactic structure of code, we increase the margin by which a Transformer-based system outperforms previous systems. With this, it outperforms the accuracy of several state-of-the-art next token prediction systems by margins ranging from 14% to 18%. We present in the paper several ways of communicating the code structure to the Transformer, which is fundamentally built for processing sequence data. We provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation of our proposal, along with alternative design choices, on a standard Python dataset, as well as on Facebook internal Python corpus. Our code and data preparation pipeline will be available in open source.

Image classifiers are an important component of today's software, from consumer and business applications to safety-critical domains. The advent of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is the key catalyst behind such wide-spread success. However, wide adoption comes with serious concerns about the robustness of software systems dependent on DNNs for image classification, as several severe erroneous behaviors have been reported under sensitive and critical circumstances. We argue that developers need to rigorously test their software's image classifiers and delay deployment until acceptable. We present an approach to testing image classifier robustness based on class property violations.

Recent works in DNN testing show that DNN based image classifiers are susceptible to confusion and bias errors. A DNN model, even robust trained model can be highly confused between certain pair of objects or highly bias towards some object than others. In this paper, we propose a differentiable distance metric, which is highly correlated with confusion errors. We propose a repairing approach by increasing the distance between two classes during retraining the model to reduce the confusion errors. We evaluate our approaches on both single-label and multi-label classification models and datasets. Our results show that our approach effectively reduce confusion errors with very slight accuracy reduce.

Recent advances in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have led to the development of DNN-driven autonomous cars that, using sensors like camera, LiDAR, etc., can drive without any human intervention. Most major manufacturers including Tesla, GM, Ford, BMW, and Waymo/Google are working on building and testing different types of autonomous vehicles. The lawmakers of several US states including California, Texas, and New York have passed new legislation to fast-track the process of testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles on their roads.

Correct error handling is essential for building reliable and secure systems. Unfortunately, low-level languages like C often do not support any error handling primitives and leave it up to the developers to create their own mechanisms for error propagation and handling. However, in practice, the developers often make mistakes while writing the repetitive and tedious error handling code and inadvertently introduce bugs. Such error handling bugs often have severe consequences undermining the security and reliability of the affected systems. Fixing these bugs is also tiring-they are repetitive and cumbersome to implement. Therefore, it is crucial to develop tool supports for automatically detecting and fixing error handling bugs.