From Arithmetic to Logic: The Resilience of Logic and Lookup-Based Neural Networks Under Parameter Bit-Flips

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bacellar, Alan T. L., Chemudupati, Sathvik, Nag, Shashank, Seigler, Allison, Lima, Priscila M. V., França, Felipe M. G., John, Lizy K.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910068287471616
author Bacellar, Alan T. L.
Chemudupati, Sathvik
Nag, Shashank
Seigler, Allison
Lima, Priscila M. V.
França, Felipe M. G.
John, Lizy K.
author_facet Bacellar, Alan T. L.
Chemudupati, Sathvik
Nag, Shashank
Seigler, Allison
Lima, Priscila M. V.
França, Felipe M. G.
John, Lizy K.
contents The deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) in safety-critical edge environments necessitates robustness against hardware-induced bit-flip errors. While empirical studies indicate that reducing numerical precision can improve fault tolerance, the theoretical basis of this phenomenon remains underexplored. In this work, we study resilience as a structural property of neural architectures rather than solely as a property of a dataset-specific trained solution. By deriving the expected squared error (MSE) under independent parameter bit flips across multiple numerical formats and layer primitives, we show that lower precision, higher sparsity, bounded activations, and shallow depth are consistently favored under this corruption model. We then argue that logic and lookup-based neural networks realize the joint limit of these design trends. Through ablation studies on the MLPerf Tiny benchmark suite, we show that the observed empirical trends are consistent with the theoretical predictions, and that LUT-based models remain highly stable in corruption regimes where standard floating-point models fail sharply. Furthermore, we identify a novel even-layer recovery effect unique to logic-based architectures and analyze the structural conditions under which it emerges. Overall, our results suggest that shifting from continuous arithmetic weights to discrete Boolean lookups can provide a favorable accuracy-resilience trade-off for hardware fault tolerance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_22770
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Arithmetic to Logic: The Resilience of Logic and Lookup-Based Neural Networks Under Parameter Bit-Flips
Bacellar, Alan T. L.
Chemudupati, Sathvik
Nag, Shashank
Seigler, Allison
Lima, Priscila M. V.
França, Felipe M. G.
John, Lizy K.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) in safety-critical edge environments necessitates robustness against hardware-induced bit-flip errors. While empirical studies indicate that reducing numerical precision can improve fault tolerance, the theoretical basis of this phenomenon remains underexplored. In this work, we study resilience as a structural property of neural architectures rather than solely as a property of a dataset-specific trained solution. By deriving the expected squared error (MSE) under independent parameter bit flips across multiple numerical formats and layer primitives, we show that lower precision, higher sparsity, bounded activations, and shallow depth are consistently favored under this corruption model. We then argue that logic and lookup-based neural networks realize the joint limit of these design trends. Through ablation studies on the MLPerf Tiny benchmark suite, we show that the observed empirical trends are consistent with the theoretical predictions, and that LUT-based models remain highly stable in corruption regimes where standard floating-point models fail sharply. Furthermore, we identify a novel even-layer recovery effect unique to logic-based architectures and analyze the structural conditions under which it emerges. Overall, our results suggest that shifting from continuous arithmetic weights to discrete Boolean lookups can provide a favorable accuracy-resilience trade-off for hardware fault tolerance.
title From Arithmetic to Logic: The Resilience of Logic and Lookup-Based Neural Networks Under Parameter Bit-Flips
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22770