An Empirical Study on Data Distribution-Aware Test Selection for Deep Learning Enhancement

in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (2022)

Similar to traditional software that is constantly under evolution, deep neural networks (DNNs) need to evolve upon the rapid growth of test data for continuous enhancement, e.g., adapting to distribution ... [more ▼]

Similar to traditional software that is constantly under evolution, deep neural networks (DNNs) need to evolve upon the rapid growth of test data for continuous enhancement, e.g., adapting to distribution shift in a new environment for deployment. However, it is labor-intensive to manually label all the collected test data. Test selection solves this problem by strategically choosing a small set to label. Via retraining with the selected set, DNNs will achieve competitive accuracy. Unfortunately, existing selection metrics involve three main limitations: 1) using different retraining processes; 2) ignoring data distribution shifts; 3) being insufficiently evaluated. To fill this gap, we first conduct a systemically empirical study to reveal the impact of the retraining process and data distribution on model enhancement. Then based on our findings, we propose a novel distribution-aware test (DAT) selection metric. Experimental results reveal that retraining using both the training and selected data outperforms using only the selected data. None of the selection metrics perform the best under various data distributions. By contrast, DAT effectively alleviates the impact of distribution shifts and outperforms the compared metrics by up to 5 times and 30.09% accuracy improvement for model enhancement on simulated and in-the-wild distribution shift scenarios, respectively. [less ▲]

Requirements And Threat Models of Adversarial Attacks and Robustness of Chest X-ray classification

E-print/Working paper (2021)

Vulnerability to adversarial attacks is a well-known weakness of Deep Neural Networks. While most of the studies focus on natural images with standardized benchmarks like ImageNet and CIFAR, little ... [more ▼]

Vulnerability to adversarial attacks is a well-known weakness of Deep Neural Networks. While most of the studies focus on natural images with standardized benchmarks like ImageNet and CIFAR, little research has considered real world applications, in particular in the medical domain. Our research shows that, contrary to previous claims, robustness of chest x-ray classification is much harder to evaluate and leads to very different assessments based on the dataset, the architecture and robustness metric. We argue that previous studies did not take into account the peculiarity of medical diagnosis, like the co-occurrence of diseases, the disagreement of labellers (domain experts), the threat model of the attacks and the risk implications for each successful attack. In this paper, we discuss the methodological foundations, review the pitfalls and best practices, and suggest new methodological considerations for evaluating the robustness of chest xray classification models. Our evaluation on 3 datasets, 7 models, and 18 diseases is the largest evaluation of robustness of chest x-ray classification models. We believe our findings will provide reliable guidelines for realistic evaluation and improvement of the robustness of machine learning models for medical diagnosis. [less ▲]

A Formal Framework of Software Product Line Analyses

in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (2021), 30(3), 1-37

Adversarial Robustness in Multi-Task Learning: Promises and Illusions

E-print/Working paper (2021)

Vulnerability to adversarial attacks is a well-known weakness of Deep Neural networks. While most of the studies focus on single-task neural networks with computer vision datasets, very little research ... [more ▼]

Vulnerability to adversarial attacks is a well-known weakness of Deep Neural networks. While most of the studies focus on single-task neural networks with computer vision datasets, very little research has considered complex multi-task models that are common in real applications. In this paper, we evaluate the design choices that impact the robustness of multi-task deep learning networks. We provide evidence that blindly adding auxiliary tasks, or weighing the tasks provides a false sense of robustness. Thereby, we tone down the claim made by previous research and study the different factors which may affect robustness. In particular, we show that the choice of the task to incorporate in the loss function are important factors that can be leveraged to yield more robust models. [less ▲]

BURST: a benchmarking platform for uniform random sampling techniques

in SPLC '21: 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference, Leicester, United Kindom, September 6-11, 2021, Volume B (2021)

Towards Exploring the Limitations of Active Learning: An Empirical Study

in The 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. (2021)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are being increasingly deployed as integral parts of software systems. However, due to the complex interconnections among hidden layers and massive hyperparameters, DNNs ... [more ▼]

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are being increasingly deployed as integral parts of software systems. However, due to the complex interconnections among hidden layers and massive hyperparameters, DNNs require being trained using a large number of labeled inputs, which calls for extensive human effort for collecting and labeling data. Spontaneously, to alleviate this growing demand, a surge of state-of-the-art studies comes up with different metrics to select a small yet informative dataset for the model training. These research works have demonstrated that DNN models can achieve competitive performance using a carefully selected small set of data. However, the literature lacks proper investigation of the limitations of data selection metrics, which is crucial to apply them in practice. In this paper, we fill this gap and conduct an extensive empirical study to explore the limits of selection metrics. Our study involves 15 selection metrics evaluated over 5 datasets (2 image classification tasks and 3 text classification tasks), 10 DNN architectures, and 20 labeling budgets (ratio of training data being labeled). Our findings reveal that, while selection metrics are usually effective in producing accurate models, they may induce a loss of model robustness (against adversarial examples) and resilience to compression. Overall, we demonstrate the existence of a trade-off between labeling effort and different model qualities. This paves the way for future research in devising selection metrics considering multiple quality criteria. [less ▲]

Load approximation for uncertain topologies in the low-voltage grid

in INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SMART GRID COMMUNICATIONS, 11-13 November 2020 (2020, November)

Smart grids allow operators to monitor the grid continuously, detect occurring incidents, and trigger corrective actions. To perform that, they require a deep understanding of the effective situation ... [more ▼]

Smart grids allow operators to monitor the grid continuously, detect occurring incidents, and trigger corrective actions. To perform that, they require a deep understanding of the effective situation within the grid. However, some parameters of the grid may not be known with absolute confidence. Reasoning over the grid despite uncertainty needs the consideration of all possible states. In this paper, we propose an approach to enumerate only valid potential grid states. Thereby, we allow discarding invalid assumptions that poison the results of a given computation procedure. We validate our approach based on a real-world topology from the power grid in Luxembourg. We show that the estimation of cable load is negatively affected by invalid fuse state combinations, in terms of computation time and accuracy. [less ▲]

Data-driven simulation and optimization for covid-19 exit strategies

in Ghamizi, Salah; Rwemalika, Renaud; Cordy, Maxime (Eds.) et al Data-driven simulation and optimization for covid-19 exit strategies (2020, August)

The rapid spread of the Coronavirus SARS-2 is a major challenge that led almost all governments worldwide to take drastic measures to respond to the tragedy. Chief among those measures is the massive ... [more ▼]

The rapid spread of the Coronavirus SARS-2 is a major challenge that led almost all governments worldwide to take drastic measures to respond to the tragedy. Chief among those measures is the massive lockdown of entire countries and cities, which beyond its global economic impact has created some deep social and psychological tensions within populations. While the adopted mitigation measures (including the lockdown) have generally proven useful, policymakers are now facing a critical question: how and when to lift the mitigation measures? A carefully-planned exit strategy is indeed necessary to recover from the pandemic without risking a new outbreak. Classically, exit strategies rely on mathematical modeling to predict the effect of public health interventions. Such models are unfortunately known to be sensitive to some key parameters, which are usually set based on rules-of-thumb.In this paper, we propose to augment epidemiological forecasting with actual data-driven models that will learn to fine-tune predictions for different contexts (e.g., per country). We have therefore built a pandemic simulation and forecasting toolkit that combines a deep learning estimation of the epidemiological parameters of the disease in order to predict the cases and deaths, and a genetic algorithm component searching for optimal trade-offs/policies between constraints and objectives set by decision-makers.Replaying pandemic evolution in various countries, we experimentally show that our approach yields predictions with much lower error rates than pure epidemiological models in 75% of the cases and achieves a 95% R² score when the learning is transferred and tested on unseen countries. When used for forecasting, this approach provides actionable insights into the impact of individual measures and strategies. [less ▲]

Preventing Overloading Incidents on Smart Grids: A Multiobjective Combinatorial Optimization Approach

in Communications in Computer and Information Science (2020, February 15)

Cable overloading is one of the most critical disturbances that may occur in smart grids, as it can cause damage to the distribution power lines. Therefore, the circuits are protected by fuses so that ... [more ▼]

Cable overloading is one of the most critical disturbances that may occur in smart grids, as it can cause damage to the distribution power lines. Therefore, the circuits are protected by fuses so that, the overload could trip the fuse, opening the circuit, and stopping the flow and heating. However, sustained overloads, even if they are below the safety limits, could also damage the wires. To prevent overload, smart grid operators can switch the fuses on or off to protect the circuits, or remotely curtail the over-producing/over-consuming users. Nevertheless, making the most appropriate decision is a daunting decision-making task, notably due to contractual and technical obligations. In this paper, we define and formulate the overloading prevention problem as a Multiobjective Mixed Integer Quadratically Constrained Program. We also suggest a solution method using a combinatorial optimization approach with a state-of-the-art exact solver. We evaluate this approach for this real-world problem together with Creos Luxembourg S.A., the leading grid operator in Luxembourg, and show that our method can suggest optimal countermeasures to operators facing potential overloading incidents. [less ▲]

Search-based adversarial testing and improvement of constrained credit scoring systems

in ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE '20), November 8-13, 2020 (2020)