Coverage-Guided Testing for Deep Learning Models: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract

As Deep Learning (DL) models are increasingly applied in safety-critical domains, ensuring their quality has emerged as a pressing challenge in modern software engineering. Among emerging validation paradigms, coverage-guided testing (CGT) has gained prominence as a systematic framework for identifying erroneous or unexpected model behaviors. Despite growing research attention, existing CGT studies remain methodologically fragmented, limiting the understanding of current advances and emerging trends. This work addresses that gap through a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art CGT methods for DL models, including test coverage analysis, coverage-guided test input generation, and coverage-guided test input optimization. This work provides detailed taxonomies to organize these methods based on methodological characteristics and application scenarios. We also investigate evaluation practices adopted in existing studies, including the use of benchmark datasets, model architectures, and evaluation aspects. Finally, open challenges and future directions are highlighted in terms of the correlation between structural coverage and testing objectives, method generalizability across tasks and models, practical deployment concerns, and the need for standardized evaluation and tool support. This work aims to provide a roadmap for future academic research and engineering practice in DL model quality assurance.