Ex2: Monte Carlo Tree Search-based test inputs prioritization for fuzzing deep neural networks

Fuzzing is considered to be an essential approach to guarantee the reliability of deep neural networks (DNNs) based systems. The DNN fuzzing leverages various inputs prioritization methods to guide the testing process. The current research mainly focus on constructing testing metrics that symbolize the logical representation of the DNN to guide the generation of test cases, which neglects the potential performance brought by implementing heuristic algorithm. Moreover, the straightforward implementation of queue structure can not represent the metamorphic relationships between generated inputs in DNN fuzzing. Therefore, developing the appropriate heuristic algorithm-based inputs prioritization method is critical to improve the performance of DNN fuzzers. In this paper, we propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based inputs prioritization method called E x 2 $E{x}<^>{2}$ (Exploration and Exploitation) that formulates DNN testing exploration as the sequential decision process. The technique introduces an innovative tree-structure design that schedules inputs from the statistical perspective. Different from traditional DNN testing, the batch pool is maintained in the form of nodes in MCTS. The links between nodes precisely represent the metamorphic relationship between input batches, which indicates the potential value for in-depth search. Furthermore, a novel simulation mechanism is implemented to adapt MCTS in DNN testing, which attain better coverage feedback. The effectiveness of our method is comprehensively investigated on six popular deep learning models from LeNet and VGG families. The comparison experiments are conducted between DeepHunter, TensorFuzz, and DeepSmartFuzzer to demonstrate efficacy on various testing metrics. The experimental results show that the E x 2 $E{x}<^>{2}$ significantly enhance the coverage gain of DNN fuzzing up to 30% against the best performance in comparison groups.