AutoMR: Automatic Discovery and Cleansing of Numerical Metamorphic Relations

Abstract

This artifact is related to our Research Track paper that is accepted at ICSME 2019 [1]. Metamorphic relations (MRs) describe the invariant relationships between program inputs and outputs. We propose AutoMR, a novel method for systematically inferring and cleansing MRs. AutoMR can discover various types of equality and inequality MRs through a search method (particle swarm optimization). It also employs matrix singular-value decomposition and constraint solving techniques to remove the redundant MRs in the search results. Our experiments on 37 numerical programs show that AutoMR can effectively infer accurate and succinct MRs and outperform the state-of-the-art method. Furthermore, we show that the discovered MRs have high fault detection ability in mutation testing and differential testing.