Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
1-2025
Abstract
The competitive game between agents exists in many critical applications, such as military unmanned aerial vehicles. It is urgent to test these agents to reduce the significant losses caused by their failures. Existing studies mainly are to construct a testing agent that competes with the target agent to induce its failures. These approaches usually focus on a single task, requiring much more time for multi-task testing. However, if the previously tested tasks (source tasks) and the task to be tested (target task) share similar agents or task objectives, the transferable knowledge in source tasks can potentially increase the effectiveness of testing in the target task. We propose Demo2Test for conducting transfer testing of agents in the competitive environment, i.e., leveraging the demonstrations of failure scenarios from the source task to boost the testing effectiveness in the target task. It trains a testing agent with demonstrations and incorporates the action perturbation at key states to balance the number of revealed failures and their diversity. We conduct experiments in the simulated robotics competitive environments of MuJoCo. The results indicate that Demo2Test outperforms the best-performing baseline with improvements ranging from 22.38 to 87.98%, and 12.69% to 60.98%, in terms of the number and diversity of discovered failure scenarios, respectively.
Keywords
Adversarial Agent Testing, Key State Perturbation, Testing Diversity, Transfer Reinforcement Learning
Discipline
Software Engineering | Theory and Algorithms
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Volume
34
Issue
2
First Page
1
Last Page
28
ISSN
1049-331X
Identifier
10.1145/3696001
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
CHEN, Jianming; WANG, Yawen; WANG, Junjie; XIE, Xiaofei; WANG, Dandan; WANG, Qing; and XU, Fanjiang.
Demo2Test: Transfer testing of agent in competitive environment with failure demonstrations. (2025). ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. 34, (2), 1-28.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/10120
Copyright Owner and License
Author-CC-BY
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3696001
