Accelerating Delta Debugging through Probabilistic Monotonicity Assessment

TL;DR

This paper introduces Probabilistic Monotonicity Assessment (PMA), a method that improves delta debugging efficiency by probabilistically modeling search space monotonicity, reducing redundant tests without losing effectiveness.

Contribution

PMA dynamically assesses search space monotonicity during debugging, enabling probabilistic exclusion of non-failure-inducing subsets and significantly improving delta debugging performance.

Findings

PMA reduces processing time by 59.2% compared to CHISEL.

PMA accelerates reduction speed by 3.32x over CHISEL.

PMA decreases final program size by 6.7% compared to CHISEL.

Abstract

Delta debugging assumes search space monotonicity: if a program causes a failure, any supersets of that program will also induce the same failure, permitting the exclusion of subsets of non-failure-inducing programs. However, this assumption does not always hold in practice. This paper introduces Probabilistic Monotonicity Assessment (PMA), enhancing the efficiency of DDMIN-style algorithms without sacrificing effectiveness. PMA dynamically models and assesses the search space's monotonicity based on prior tests tried during the debugging process and uses a confidence function to quantify monotonicity, thereby enabling the probabilistic exclusion of subsets of non-failure-inducing programs. Our approach significantly reduces redundant tests that would otherwise be performed, without compromising the quality of the reduction. We evaluated PMA against two leading DDMIN-style tools, CHISEL and ProbDD. Our findings indicate that PMA cuts processing time by 59.2% compared to CHISEL, accelerates the reduction process (i.e., the number of tokens deleted per second) by 3.32x, and decreases the sizes of the final reduced programs by 6.7%. Against ProbDD, PMA reduces processing time by 22.0%, achieves a 1.34x speedup in the reduction process, and further decreases the sizes of the final reduced programs by 3.0%. These findings affirm PMA's role in significantly improving delta debugging's efficiency while maintaining or enhancing its effectiveness.