Feature-Aware Test Generation for Deep Learning Models

Abstract

As deep learning (DL) models are widely used in software systems, test generation plays a crucial role in assessing the quality of such models before deployment. To date, the most advanced test generators rely on generative AI to synthesize inputs; however, these approaches remain limited in providing semantic insight into the causes of misbehaviours and in offering fine-grained semantic controllability over the generated inputs. In this paper, we introduce Detect, a feature-aware test generation framework for vision-based DL models that generates inputs by perturbing disentangled semantic attributes within the latent space. Detect perturbs individual latent features in a controlled way and observes how these changes affect the model’s output. Through this process, it identifies which features lead to behaviour shifts and uses a vision-language model for semantic attribution. Detect enables semantically controlled perturbations in StyleGAN’s disentangled latent space, allowing us to test whether a model generalizes under task-relevant feature changes and remains invariant under task-irrelevant ones. Empirical results across image classification and detection tasks show that Detect generates high-quality test cases with fine-grained control, reveals distinct shortcut behaviours across model architectures (convolutional and transformer-based), and bugs that are not captured by accuracy metrics. Specifically, Detect outperforms a state-of-the-art test generator in decision boundary discovery and provides more interpretable feature-level diagnoses than a leading spurious feature localization method in identifying robustness failures. Our findings show that fully fine-tuned convolutional models are prone to overfitting on localized cues, such as co-occurring visual traits, while weakly supervised transformers tend to rely on global features, such as environmental variances. These findings highlight the value of interpretable and feature-aware testing in improving DL model reliability, and refocus DL testing from class-level failure discovery to feature-level, semantically grounded diagnosis and repair.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2026 · DOI ↗