In the automotive industry, automated hardware-software integration testing is of vital importance for ensuring software quality and reducing project costs. However, in practice, the generation of automated test cases for such testing faces many challenges, primarily due to the complexity, implicit, and difficulty in identifying requirement dependencies. To address this issue, this paper proposes a requirement dependency-driven automated test case generation method. This method utilizes large language models to directly extract structured models, e.g., flowcharts, from natural language requirements documents. By analyzing these flowcharts, it can accurately identify implicit requirements dependencies and generate test scenarios, thereby specifying the execution order and temporal constraints for test case generation. In a real-world case study with the Beijing Automotive Industry Corporation (BAIC), the method successfully processed 300 functional requirements and identified a total of 4731 implicit dependencies. The content accuracy rate of the generated flowcharts reached 81.24%, and the business scenario coverage rate of the test cases reached 82.67%. These results preliminarily demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our approach, significantly enhancing the level of automation in automotive integrated testing and providing strong technical support and reference for related practices in the industry.

FinTech software, crucial for both safety and timely market deployment, presents a compelling case for automated acceptance testing against regulatory business rules. However, the inherent challenges of comprehending unstructured natural language descriptions of these rules and crafting comprehensive test cases demand human intelligence. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) holds promise for automated test case generation, leveraging their natural language processing capabilities. Yet, their dependence on human intervention for effective prompting hampers efficiency. In response, we introduce a groundbreaking, fully automated approach for generating high-coverage test cases from natural language business rules. Our methodology seamlessly integrates the versatility of LLMs with the predictability of algorithmic methods. We fine-tune pre-trained LLMs for improved information extraction accuracy and algorithmically generate comprehensive testable scenarios for the extracted business rules. Our prototype, LLM4Fin, is designed for testing real-world stock-trading software. Experimental results demonstrate LLM4Fin’s superiority over both state-of-the-art LLM, such as ChatGPT, and skilled testing engineers. We achieve remarkable performance, with up to 98.18% and an average of 20%−110% improvement on business scenario coverage, and up to 93.72% on code coverage, while reducing the time cost from 20 minutes to a mere 7 seconds. These results provide robust evidence of the framework’s practical applicability and efficiency, marking a significant advancement in FinTech software testing.

This paper proposes a novel, abstraction-based, certified training method for robust image classifiers. Via abstraction, all perturbed images are mapped into intervals before feeding into neural networks for training. By training on intervals, all the perturbed images that are mapped to the same interval are classified as the same label, rendering the variance of training sets to be small and the loss landscape of the models to be smooth. Consequently, our approach significantly improves the robustness of trained models. For the abstraction, our training method also enables a sound and complete black-box verification approach, which is orthogonal and scalable to arbitrary types of neural networks regardless of their sizes and architectures. We evaluate our method on a wide range of benchmarks in different scales. The experimental results show that our method outperforms state of the art by (i) reducing the verified errors of trained models up to 95.64%; (ii) totally achieving up to 602.50x speedup; and (iii) scaling up to larger models with up to 138 million trainable parameters. The demo is available at https://github.com/zhangzhaodi233/ABSCERT.git.

The robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs) is crucial to the hosting system’s reliability and security. Formal verification has been demonstrated to be effective in providing provable robustness guarantees. To improve its scalability, over-approximating the non-linear activation functions in DNNs by linear constraints has been widely adopted, which transforms the verification problem into an efficiently solvable linear programming problem. Many efforts have been dedicated to defining the so-called tightest approximations to reduce overestimation imposed by over-approximation. In this paper, we study existing approaches and identify a dominant factor in defining tight approximation, namely the approximation domain of the activation function. We find out that tight approximations defined on approximation domains may not be as tight as the ones on their actual domains, yet existing approaches all rely only on approximation domains. Based on this observation, we propose a novel dual-approximation approach to tighten overapproximations, leveraging an activation function’s underestimated domain to define tight approximation bounds. We implement our approach with two complementary algorithms based respectively on Monte Carlo simulation and gradient descent into a tool called DualApp. We assess it on a comprehensive benchmark of DNNs with different architectures. Our experimental results show that DualApp significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches with 100% − 1000% improvement on the verified robustness ratio and 10.64% on average (up to 66.53%) on the certified lower bound.