An ECC-based Fault Tolerance Approach for DNNs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Raji, Mohsen, Zaree, Mohammad, Soroush, Kimia
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Raji, Mohsen
Zaree, Mohammad
Soroush, Kimia
author_facet Raji, Mohsen
Zaree, Mohammad
Soroush, Kimia
contents Deep Neural Network (DNN) has achieve great success in solving a wide range of machine learning problems. Recently, they have been deployed in datacenters (potentially for business-critical or industrial applications) and safety-critical systems such as self-driving cars. So, their correct functionality in the presence of potential bit-flip errors on DNN parameters stored in memories plays the key role in their applicability in safety-critical applications. In this paper, a fault tolerance approach based on Error Correcting Codes (ECC), called SPW, is proposed to ensure the correct functionality of DNNs in the presence of bit-flip faults. In the proposed approach, error occurrence is detected by the stored ECC and then, it is correct in case of a single-bit error or the weight is completely set to zero (i.e. masked) otherwise. A statistical fault injection campaign is proposed and utilized to investigate the efficacy of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the DNN increases by more than 300% in the presence with Bit Error Rate of 10^(-1) in comparison to the case where ECC technique is applied, in expense of just 47.5% area overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_12347
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An ECC-based Fault Tolerance Approach for DNNs
Raji, Mohsen
Zaree, Mohammad
Soroush, Kimia
Hardware Architecture
Deep Neural Network (DNN) has achieve great success in solving a wide range of machine learning problems. Recently, they have been deployed in datacenters (potentially for business-critical or industrial applications) and safety-critical systems such as self-driving cars. So, their correct functionality in the presence of potential bit-flip errors on DNN parameters stored in memories plays the key role in their applicability in safety-critical applications. In this paper, a fault tolerance approach based on Error Correcting Codes (ECC), called SPW, is proposed to ensure the correct functionality of DNNs in the presence of bit-flip faults. In the proposed approach, error occurrence is detected by the stored ECC and then, it is correct in case of a single-bit error or the weight is completely set to zero (i.e. masked) otherwise. A statistical fault injection campaign is proposed and utilized to investigate the efficacy of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the DNN increases by more than 300% in the presence with Bit Error Rate of 10^(-1) in comparison to the case where ECC technique is applied, in expense of just 47.5% area overhead.
title An ECC-based Fault Tolerance Approach for DNNs
topic Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12347