Towards learning visual semantics

We envision visual semantics learning (VSL), a novel methodology that derives high-level functional description of given software from its visual (graphical) outputs. By visual semantics, we mean the semantic description about the software’s behaviors that are exhibited in its visual outputs. VSL works by composing this description based on visual element labels extracted from these outputs through image/video understanding and natural language generation. The result of VSL can then support tasks that may benefit from the high-level functional description. Just like a developer relies on program understanding to conduct many of such tasks, automatically understanding software (i.e., by machine rather than by human developers) is necessary to eventually enable fully automated software engineering. Apparently, VSL only works with software that does produce visual outputs that meaningfully demonstrate the software’s behaviors. Nevertheless, learning visual semantics would be a useful first step towards automated software understanding. We outline the design of our approach to VSL and present early results demonstrating its merits.