Diffchaser: Detecting disagreements for deep neural networks

Abstract

The platform migration and customization have become an indispensable process of deep neural network (DNN) development lifecycle. A high-precision but complex DNN trained in the cloud on massive data and powerful GPUS often goes through an optimization phase (e.g., quantization, compression) before deployment to a target device (e.g., mobile device). A test set that effectively uncovers the disagreements of a DNN and its optimized variant provides certain feedback to debug and further enhance the optimization procedure. However, the minor inconsistency between a DNN and its optimized version is often hard to detect and easily bypasses the original test set. This paper proposes DiffChaser, an automated black-box testing framework to detect untargeted/targeted disagreements between version variants of a DNN. We demonstrate 1) its effectiveness by comparing with the state-of-the-art techniques, and 2) its usefulness in real-world DNN product deployment involved with quantization and optimization.