CAFD: Concept-Aware DNN Fault Detection using VLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Abbasishahkoo, Amin, Dadkhah, Mahboubeh, Briand, Lionel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Abbasishahkoo, Amin
Dadkhah, Mahboubeh
Briand, Lionel
author_facet Abbasishahkoo, Amin
Dadkhah, Mahboubeh
Briand, Lionel
contents Fault detection for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has received increasing attention in recent years. While more advanced hybrid approaches have been proposed to combine multiple sources of information and outperform earlier techniques, they often incur substantial computational overhead, limiting scalability and practicality in real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce Concept-Aware Fault Detection (CAFD), a learning-based approach that achieves superior fault detection performance by effectively integrating multiple information sources while maintaining practical efficiency. Specifically, CAFD is trained using a carefully selected set of informative features, including model-based signals derived from the DNN's outputs, distance-based features, and a novel concept-based feature, called Concept Failure Ratio (CFR). CFR leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to extract textual concepts from images and quantify the likelihood that their presence is associated with DNN failures. By incorporating this feature, CAFD benefits from complementary semantic information, enabling more effective fault detection. Our results demonstrate that CFR serves as an effective indicator for DNN fault detection. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of CAFD, comparing it against five state-of-the-art baselines across three subject DNN models and datasets, including ImageNet. Across a wide range of constrained selection budgets, CAFD consistently outperforms all baselines in Fault Detection Rate (FDR), achieving average FDR improvements of 18.3% across all investigated subjects and budget sizes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_24008
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CAFD: Concept-Aware DNN Fault Detection using VLMs
Abbasishahkoo, Amin
Dadkhah, Mahboubeh
Briand, Lionel
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Software Engineering
Fault detection for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has received increasing attention in recent years. While more advanced hybrid approaches have been proposed to combine multiple sources of information and outperform earlier techniques, they often incur substantial computational overhead, limiting scalability and practicality in real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce Concept-Aware Fault Detection (CAFD), a learning-based approach that achieves superior fault detection performance by effectively integrating multiple information sources while maintaining practical efficiency. Specifically, CAFD is trained using a carefully selected set of informative features, including model-based signals derived from the DNN's outputs, distance-based features, and a novel concept-based feature, called Concept Failure Ratio (CFR). CFR leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to extract textual concepts from images and quantify the likelihood that their presence is associated with DNN failures. By incorporating this feature, CAFD benefits from complementary semantic information, enabling more effective fault detection. Our results demonstrate that CFR serves as an effective indicator for DNN fault detection. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of CAFD, comparing it against five state-of-the-art baselines across three subject DNN models and datasets, including ImageNet. Across a wide range of constrained selection budgets, CAFD consistently outperforms all baselines in Fault Detection Rate (FDR), achieving average FDR improvements of 18.3% across all investigated subjects and budget sizes.
title CAFD: Concept-Aware DNN Fault Detection using VLMs
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24008