Abstract: Hardware transient faults are proven to have a significant impact on deep neural networks (DNNs), whose safety-critical misclassification (SCM) in autonomous vehicles, healthcare, and space applications is increased up to four times. However, the inaccuracy evaluation using accurate fault injection is time-consuming and requires several hours and even a couple of days on a complete simulation platform. To accelerate the evaluation of hardware transient faults on DNNs, we design a unified and end-to-end automatic methodology, A-Mean, using the silent data corruption (SDC) rate of basic operations (such as convolution, addition, multiply, ReLU, and max-pooling) and a static two-level mean calculation mechanism to rapidly compute the overall SDC rate, for estimating the general classification metric accuracy and application-specific metric SCM. More importantly, a max-policy is used to determine the SDC boundary of non-sequential structures in DNNs. Then, the worst-case scheme is used to further calculate the enlarged SCM and halved accuracy under transient faults, via merging the static results of SDC with the original data from one-time dynamic fault-free execution. Furthermore, all of the steps mentioned above have been implemented automatically, so that this easy-to-use automatic tool can be employed for prompt evaluation of transient faults on diverse DNNs. Meanwhile, a novel metric "fault sensitivity" is defined to characterize the variation of transient fault-induced higher SCM and lower accuracy. The comparative results with a state-of-the-art fault injection method TensorFI+ on five DNN models and four datasets show that our proposed estimation method A-Mean achieves up to 922.80 times speedup, with just 4.20% SCM loss and 0.77% accuracy loss on average. The artifact of A-Mean is publicly available at https://github.com/breatrice321/A-Meanhttps://github.com/breatrice321/A-Mean.

Key words: Analytical model; Deep neural networks; Hardware transient faults; Fast evaluation; Automatic evaluation tool

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