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Deep Learning (DL) techniques are increasingly being incorporated in critical software systems today. DL software is buggy too. Recent work in SE has characterized these bugs, studied fix patterns, and proposed detection and localization strategies. In this work, we introduce a preventative measure. We propose design by contract for DL libraries, DL Contract for short, to document the properties of DL libraries and provide developers with a mechanism to identify bugs during development. While DL Contract builds on the traditional design by contract techniques, we need to address unique challenges. In particular, we need to document properties of the training process that are not visible at the functional interface of the DL libraries. To solve these problems, we have introduced mechanisms that allow developers to specify properties of the model architecture, data, and training process. We have designed and implemented DL Contract for Python-based DL libraries and used it to document the properties of Keras, a well-known DL library. We evaluate DL Contract in terms of effectiveness, runtime overhead, and usability. To evaluate the utility of DL Contract, we have developed 15 sample contracts specifically for training problems and structural bugs. We have adopted four well-vetted benchmarks from prior works on DL bug detection and repair. For the effectiveness, DL Contract correctly detects 259 bugs in 272 real-world buggy programs, from well-vetted benchmarks provided in prior work on DL bug detection and repair. We found that the DL Contract overhead is fairly minimal for the used benchmarks. Lastly, to evaluate the usability, we conducted a survey of twenty participants who have used DL Contract to find and fix bugs. The results reveal that DL Contract can be very helpful to DL application developers when debugging their code.
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This content will become publicly available on July 31, 2026
Leveraging Data Characteristics for Bug Localization in Deep Learning Programs
Deep Learning (DL) is a class of machine learning algorithms that are used in a wide variety of applications. Like any software system, DL programs can have bugs. To support bug localization in DL programs, several tools have been proposed in the past. As most of the bugs that occur due to improper model structure known as structural bugs lead to inadequate performance during training, it is challenging for developers to identify the root cause and address these bugs. To support bug detection and localization in DL programs, in this article, we propose Theia, which detects and localizes structural bugs in DL programs. Unlike the previous works, Theia considers the training dataset characteristics to automatically detect bugs in DL programs developed using two DL libraries,KerasandPyTorch. Since training the DL models is a time-consuming process, Theia detects these bugs at the beginning of the training process and alerts the developer with informative messages containing the bug’s location and actionable fixes which will help them to improve the structure of the model. We evaluated Theia on a benchmark of 40 real-world buggy DL programs obtained fromStack Overflow. Our results show that Theia successfully localizes 57/75 structural bugs in 40 buggy programs, whereas NeuraLint, a state-of-the-art approach capable of localizing structural bugs before training localizes 17/75 bugs.
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- PAR ID:
- 10636843
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 1049-331X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 29
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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