In modern software engineering, Continuous Integration (CI) has become an indispensable step towards systematically managing the life cycles of software development. Large companies struggle with keeping the pipeline updated and operational, in useful time, due to the large amount of changes and addition of features, that build on top of each other and have several developers, working on different platforms. Associated with such software changes, there is always a strong component of Testing. As teams and projects grow, exhaustive testing quickly becomes inhibitive, becoming adamant to select the most relevant test cases earlier, without compromising software quality. This paper extends recent studies on applying Reinforcement Learning to optimize testing strategies. We test its ability to adapt to new environments, by testing it on novel data extracted from a financial institution, yielding a Normalized percentage of Fault Detection (NAPFD) of over $0.6$ using the Network Approximator and Test Case Failure Reward. Additionally, we studied the impact of using Decision Tree (DT) Approximator as a model for memory representation, which failed to produce significant improvements relative to Artificial Neural Networks.
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；AIRI；Federal Research Center “Computer Science and Control” of the Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院联邦研究中心“计算机科学与控制”）
Many challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems require designing a distribution of tasks that can be applied to train effective policies. This distribution of tasks can be specified by the curriculum. A curriculum is meant to improve the results of learning and accelerate it. We introduce Success Induced Task Prioritization (SITP), a framework for automatic curriculum learning, where a task sequence is created based on the success rate of each task. In this setting, each task is an algorithmically created environment instance with a unique configuration. The algorithm selects the order …
Simula Research Laboratory（西姆拉研究实验室）；University of Stavanger（斯塔万格大学）；ABB Robotics（ABB机器人公司）
Testing in Continuous Integration (CI) involves test case prioritization, selection, and execution at each cycle. Selecting the most promising test cases to detect bugs is hard if there are uncertainties on the impact of committed code changes or, if traceability links between code and tests are not available. This paper introduces Retecs, a new method for automatically learning test case selection and prioritization in CI with the goal to minimize the round-trip time between code commits and developer feedback on failed test cases. The Retecs method uses reinforcement learning to select and p…
Enhanced Generalization through Prioritization and Diversity in Self-Imitation Reinforcement Learning over Procedural Environments with Sparse Rewards
TECNALIA, Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA)（TECNALIA，巴斯克研究与技术联盟（BRTA））；University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)（巴斯克大学（UPV/EHU））；Rice University（莱斯大学）
Causal Information Prioritization for Efficient Reinforcement Learning
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学新型软件技术国家重点实验室）；University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学智能科学与技术学院）
National Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology（计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
In reinforcement learning, experience replay stores past samples for further reuse. Prioritized sampling is a promising technique to better utilize these samples. Previous criteria of prioritization include TD error, recentness and corrective feedback, which are mostly heuristically designed. In this work, we start from the regret minimization objective, and obtain an optimal prioritization strategy for Bellman update that can directly maximize the return of the policy. The theory suggests that data with higher hindsight TD error, better on-policiness and more accurate Q value should be assign…
Ludwig Maximilian University（路德维希-马克西米利安大学）；Siemens AG（西门子股份公司）
In Hindsight Experience Replay (HER), a reinforcement learning agent is trained by treating whatever it has achieved as virtual goals. However, in previous work, the experience was replayed at random, without considering which episode might be the most valuable for learning. In this paper, we develop an energy-based framework for prioritizing hindsight experience in robotic manipulation tasks. Our approach is inspired by the work-energy principle in physics. We define a trajectory energy function as the sum of the transition energy of the target object over the trajectory. We hypothesize that …
Ludwig Maximilian University（路德维希-马克西米利安大学）；Siemens AG（西门子股份公司）
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), an agent explores the environment and collects trajectories into the memory buffer for later learning. However, the collected trajectories can easily be imbalanced with respect to the achieved goal states. The problem of learning from imbalanced data is a well-known problem in supervised learning, but has not yet been thoroughly researched in RL. To address this problem, we propose a novel Curiosity-Driven Prioritization (CDP) framework to encourage the agent to over-sample those trajectories that have rare achieved goal states. The CDP framework mimics the huma…
Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）
Detection of malicious behavior is a fundamental problem in security. One of the major challenges in using detection systems in practice is in dealing with an overwhelming number of alerts that are triggered by normal behavior (the so-called false positives), obscuring alerts resulting from actual malicious activity. While numerous methods for reducing the scope of this issue have been proposed, ultimately one must still decide how to prioritize which alerts to investigate, and most existing prioritization methods are heuristic, for example, based on suspiciousness or priority scores. We intro…
KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；Institute for Basic Science（基础科学研究院）
Training agents via off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large memory, named replay memory, that stores past experiences used for learning. These experiences are sampled, uniformly or non-uniformly, to create the batches used for training. When calculating the loss function, off-policy algorithms assume that all samples are of the same importance. In this paper, we hypothesize that training can be enhanced by assigning different importance for each experience based on their temporal-difference (TD) error directly in the training objective. We propose a novel method that intro…
Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) is a multi-goal reinforcement learning algorithm for sparse reward functions. The algorithm treats every failure as a success for an alternative (virtual) goal that has been achieved in the episode. Virtual goals are randomly selected, irrespective of which are most instructive for the agent. In this paper, we present two improvements over the existing HER algorithm. First, we prioritize virtual goals from which the agent will learn more valuable information. We call this property the instructiveness of the virtual goal and define it by a heuristic measure, wh…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Model agnostic meta-learning (MAML) is a popular state-of-the-art meta-learning algorithm that provides good weight initialization of a model given a variety of learning tasks. The model initialized by provided weight can be fine-tuned to an unseen task despite only using a small amount of samples and within a few adaptation steps. MAML is simple and versatile but requires costly learning rate tuning and careful design of the task distribution which affects its scalability and generalization. This paper proposes a more robust MAML based on an adaptive learning scheme and a prioritization task …
National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Prioritized experience replay (PER) samples important transitions, rather than uniformly, to improve the performance of a deep reinforcement learning agent. We claim that such prioritization has to be balanced with sample diversity for making the DQN stabilized and preventing forgetting. Our proposed improvement over PER, called Predictive PER (PPER), takes three countermeasures (TDInit, TDClip, TDPred) to (i) eliminate priority outliers and explosions and (ii) improve the sample diversity and distributions, weighted by priorities, both leading to stabilizing the DQN. The most notable among th…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms designed for handling complex visual observations typically learn some sort of latent state representation, either explicitly or implicitly. Standard methods of this sort do not distinguish between functionally relevant aspects of the state and irrelevant distractors, instead aiming to represent all available information equally. We propose a modified objective for model-based RL that, in combination with mutual information maximization, allows us to learn representations and dynamics for visual model-based RL without reconstruction in a way t…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Nvidia（英伟达）
The use of past experiences to accelerate temporal difference (TD) learning of value functions, or experience replay, is a key component in deep reinforcement learning. Prioritization or reweighting of important experiences has shown to improve performance of TD learning algorithms.In this work, we propose to reweight experiences based on their likelihood under the stationary distribution of the current policy. Using the corresponding reweighted TD objective, we implicitly encourage small approximation errors on the value function over frequently encountered states. We use a likelihood-free de…
Safe Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for CubeSat Task Scheduling Based on Energy Consumption
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg (UL)（卢森堡大学跨学科安全、可靠性与信任中心（SnT））；Automation and Robotics Research Group (ARG)（自动化与机器人研究组）；Space Systems Research Group (SpaSys)（空间系统研究组）
Continuous Integration (CI) significantly reduces integration problems, speeds up development time, and shortens release time. However, it also introduces new challenges for quality assurance activities, including regression testing, which is the focus of this work. Though various approaches for test case prioritization have shown to be very promising in the context of regression testing, specific techniques must be designed to deal with the dynamic nature and timing constraints of CI. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in various challenging scenarios that require…
Testing is an important part of tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. Availability of testing is a bottleneck due to constrained resources and effective prioritization of individuals is necessary. Here, we discuss the impact of different prioritization policies on COVID-19 patient discovery and the ability of governments and health organizations to use the results for effective decision making. We suggest a framework for testing that balances the maximal discovery of positive individuals with the need for population-based surveillance aimed at understanding disease spread and characteristics. This f…
In order to collaborate efficiently with unknown partners in cooperative control settings, adaptation of the partners based on online experience is required. The rather general and widely applicable control setting, where each cooperation partner might strive for individual goals while the control laws and objectives of the partners are unknown, entails various challenges such as the non-stationarity of the environment, the multi-agent credit assignment problem, the alter-exploration problem and the coordination problem. We propose new, modular deep decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Lear…
AINTMA: Agentic AI Architecture for Autonomous Test Management with Generative Intelligence, Secure Cloud Communication and Adaptive Quality Analytics
International Business Machines (IBM)（国际商业机器公司（IBM））；Global Atlantic Financial（全球大西洋金融公司）；Docusign（DocuSign公司）；Salesforce Inc（Salesforce公司）；The Home Depot（家得宝公司）
Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（向量人工智能研究所）；University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）
Although machine learning (ML) has been successful in automating various software engineering needs, software testing still remains a highly challenging topic. In this paper, we aim to improve the generative testing of software by directly augmenting the random number generator (RNG) with a deep reinforcement learning (RL) agent using an efficient, automatically extractable state representation of the software under test. Using the Cosmos SDK as the testbed, we show that the proposed DeepRNG framework provides a statistically significant improvement to the testing of the highly complex softwar…
There have been many studies on automated test generation for mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) applications. These studies successfully demonstrate how to detect fatal exceptions and achieve high code and activity coverage with fully automated test generation engines. However, it is unclear how many GUI functions these engines manage to test. Furthermore, these engines implement only implicit test oracles. We propose Fully Automated Reinforcement LEArning-Driven Specification-Based Test Generator for Android (FARLEAD-Android). FARLEAD-Android accepts a GUI-level formal specification as a …
In this work we present a new agent architecture, called Reactor, which combines multiple algorithmic and architectural contributions to produce an agent with higher sample-efficiency than Prioritized Dueling DQN (Wang et al., 2016) and Categorical DQN (Bellemare et al., 2017), while giving better run-time performance than A3C (Mnih et al., 2016). Our first contribution is a new policy evaluation algorithm called Distributional Retrace, which brings multi-step off-policy updates to the distributional reinforcement learning setting. The same approach can be used to convert several classes of mu…
Towards Fault Tolerance in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；QiYuan Lab（启元实验室）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist), Tsinghua University（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心（BNRist），清华大学）
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Siemens AG（西门子股份公司）
In Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning, an agent learns to achieve multiple goals with a goal-conditioned policy. During learning, the agent first collects the trajectories into a replay buffer, and later these trajectories are selected randomly for replay. However, the achieved goals in the replay buffer are often biased towards the behavior policies. From a Bayesian perspective, when there is no prior knowledge about the target goal distribution, the agent should learn uniformly from diverse achieved goals. Therefore, we first propose a novel multi-goal RL objective based on weighted entropy. …
Simula Research Laboratory（西穆拉研究院）；Cisco Systems（思科系统公司）
Continuous integration testing is an important step in the modern software engineering life cycle. Test prioritization is a method that can improve the efficiency of continuous integration testing by selecting test cases that can detect faults in the early stage of each cycle. As continuous integration testing produces voluminous test execution data, test history is a commonly used artifact in test prioritization. However, existing test prioritization techniques for continuous integration either cannot handle large test history or are optimized for using a limited number of historical test cyc…
Montana State University（蒙大拿州立大学）；University of North Florida（北佛罗里达大学）
Metamorphic testing (MT) is widely used for testing programs that face the oracle problem. It uses a set of metamorphic relations (MRs), which are relations among multiple inputs and their corresponding outputs to determine whether the program under test is faulty. Typically, MRs vary in their ability to detect faults in the program under test, and some MRs tend to detect the same set of faults. In this paper, we propose approaches to prioritize MRs to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of MT for regression testing. We present two MR prioritization approaches: (1) fault-based and (2) cov…
Test Input Prioritizers (TIP) for Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are an important technique to handle the typically very large test datasets efficiently, saving computation and labeling costs. This is particularly true for large-scale, deployed systems, where inputs observed in production are recorded to serve as potential test or training data for the next versions of the system. Feng et. al. propose DeepGini, a very fast and simple TIP, and show that it outperforms more elaborate techniques such as neuron- and surprise coverage. In a large-scale study (4 case studies, 8 test datasets, 32'200 tra…
Improved test case prioritization means that software developers can detect and fix more software faults sooner than usual. But is there one "best" prioritization algorithm? Or do different kinds of projects deserve special kinds of prioritization? To answer these questions, this paper applies nine prioritization schemes to 31 projects that range from (a) highly rated open-source Github projects to (b) computational science software to (c) a closed-source project. We find that prioritization approaches that work best for open-source projects can work worst for the closed-source project (and vi…
Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学高等技术学院）；BNP Paribas（法国巴黎银行）
In modern software engineering, Continuous Integration (CI) has become an indispensable step towards systematically managing the life cycles of software development. Large companies struggle with keeping the pipeline updated and operational, in useful time, due to the large amount of changes and addition of features, that build on top of each other and have several developers, working on different platforms. Associated with such software changes, there is always a strong component of Testing. As teams and projects grow, exhaustive testing quickly becomes inhibitive, becoming adamant to select …
General game testing relies on the use of human play testers, play test scripting, and prior knowledge of areas of interest to produce relevant test data. Using deep reinforcement learning (DRL), we introduce a self-learning mechanism to the game testing framework. With DRL, the framework is capable of exploring and/or exploiting the game mechanics based on a user-defined, reinforcing reward signal. As a result, test coverage is increased and unintended game play mechanics, exploits and bugs are discovered in a multitude of game types. In this paper, we show that DRL can be used to increase te…
Regression test case prioritization (RTCP) aims to improve the rate of fault detection by executing more important test cases as early as possible. Various RTCP techniques have been proposed based on different coverage criteria. Among them, a majority of techniques leverage code coverage information to guide the prioritization process, with code units being considered individually, and in isolation. In this paper, we propose a new coverage criterion, code combinations coverage, that combines the concepts of code coverage and combination coverage. We apply this coverage criterion to RTCP, as a …
Fuzzy Inference System for Test Case Prioritization in Software Testing
School of Information Technology and Engineering（信息技术与工程学院）；Kazakh-British Technical University（哈萨克斯坦-英国技术大学）；Faculty of Information Technology（信息技术学院）
There is a growing body of research indicating the potential of machine learning to tackle complex software testing challenges. One such challenge pertains to continuous integration testing, which is highly time-constrained, and generates a large amount of data coming from iterative code commits and test runs. In such a setting, we can use plentiful test data for training machine learning predictors to identify test cases able to speed up the detection of regression bugs introduced during code integration. However, different machine learning models can have different fault prediction performan…
