Enki: A Diversity-driven Approach to Test and Train Robust Learning-enabled Systems

• Published in: ACM transactions on autonomous and adaptive systems 2021-06, Vol.15 (2), p.1-32
• Main Authors: Langford, Michael Austin, Cheng, Betty H. C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1556-4665; 1556-4703
• DOI: 10.1145/3460959

Data-driven Learning-enabled Systems are limited by the quality of available training data, particularly when trained offline. For systems that must operate in real-world environments, the space of possible conditions that can occur is vast and difficult to comprehensively predict at design time. Environmental uncertainty arises when run-time conditions diverge from design-time training conditions. To address this problem, automated methods can generate synthetic data to fill in gaps for training and test data coverage. We propose an evolution-based technique to assist developers with uncovering limitations in existing data when previously unseen environmental phenomena are introduced. This technique explores unique contexts for a given environmental condition, with an emphasis on diversity. Synthetic data generated by this technique may be used for two purposes: (1) to assess the robustness of a system to uncertain environmental factors and (2) to improve the system’s robustness. This technique is demonstrated to outperform random and greedy methods for multiple adverse environmental conditions applied to image-processing Deep Neural Networks.