Revisiting "Revisiting Neuron Coverage for DNN Testing: A Layer-Wise and Distribution-Aware Criterion": A Critical Review and Implications on DNN Coverage Testing

Abstract

We present a critical review of Neural Coverage (NLC), a state-of-the-art DNN coverage criterion by Yuan et al. at ICSE 2023. While NLC proposes to satisfy eight design requirements and demonstrates strong empirical performance, we question some of their theoretical and empirical assumptions. We observe that NLC deviates from core principles of coverage criteria, such as monotonicity and test suite order independence, and could more fully account for key properties of the covariance matrix. Additionally, we note threats to the validity of the empirical study, related to the ground truth ordering of test suites. Through our empirical validation, we substantiate our claims and propose improvements for future DNN coverage metrics. Finally, we conclude by discussing the implications of these insights.