The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

The Center for Education and Research in
Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)
Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security

Whitebox Testing, Debugging, and Repairing for Multi-module Autonomous Vehicles in Near-Collision Traffic Scenarios

Research Areas: Autonomous Systems

Principal Investigator: Tianyi Zhang

This project seeks to develop principled algorithms and techniques for systematically testing, debugging, and repairing multi-module ADS to improve their safety and reliability. The core of our research is (1) a method for automated test-scenario construction that decouples high-level semantics and low-level details through a novel Domain Specific Language-based synthesis algorithm, (2) a search-based testing method that efficiently explores the enormous space of possible scenarios and identifies collision-inducing scenarios through a layered abstraction of multi-module autonomous systems and hierarchical optimization, and (3) a new adaptive debugging and repair technique that strategically diagnoses and fixes different kinds of safety bugs in different modules at different levels of granularity.

Personnel

Other PIs: Xiangyu Zhang

Students: Zhi Tu

Representative Publications

  • Lou, Guannan, Yao Deng, Xi Zheng, Mengshi Zhang, and Tianyi Zhang. "Testing of autonomous driving systems: where are we and where should we go?." In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 31-43. 2022.

  • Deng, Y., Zheng, X., Zhang, T., Liu, H., Lou, G., Kim, M., & Chen, T. Y. (2022). A declarative metamorphic testing framework for autonomous driving. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 49(4), 1964-1982.

  • Tu, Zhi, Liangkun Niu, Wei Fan, and Tianyi Zhang. "Multi-modal Traffic Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving System Testing." Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering 2, no. FSE (2025): 1733-1756.

  • Deng, Yao, Xi Zheng, Mengshi Zhang, Guannan Lou, and Tianyi Zhang. "Scenario-based test reduction and prioritization for multi-module autonomous driving systems." In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 82-93. 2022.

  • Y. Deng, Z. Tu, J. Yao, M. Zhang, T. Zhang and X. Zheng, "TARGET: Traffic Rule-Based Test Generation for Autonomous Driving via Validated LLM-Guided Knowledge Extraction," in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 51, no. 7, pp. 1950-1968, July 2025, doi: 10.1109/TSE.2025.3569086