Real Faults in Deep Learning Fault Benchmarks: How Real Are They?

As the adoption of Deep Learning (DL) systems continues to rise, an increasing number of approaches are being proposed to test these systems, localise faults within them, and repair those faults. The best attestation of effectiveness for such techniques is an evaluation that showcases their capability to detect, localise and fix real faults. To facilitate these evaluations, the research community has collected multiple benchmarks of real faults in DL systems. In this work, we perform a manual analysis of 490 faults from five different benchmarks and identify that 305 of them are eligible for our study. Our investigation focuses specifically on how well the bugs correspond to the sources they were extracted from, which fault types are represented, and whether the bugs are reproducible. Our findings indicate that only 15.4% of the faults satisfy our realism conditions. Our attempts to reproduce these faults were successful only in 54% of cases.