When Single Event Upset Meets Deep Neural Networks: Observations, Explorations, and Remedies

--Deep Neural Network has proved its potential in various perception tasks and hence become an appealing option for interpretation and data processing in security sensitive systems. However, security-sensitive systems demand not only high perception performance, but also design robustness under various circumstances. Unlike prior works that study network robustness from software level, we investigate from hardware perspective about the impact of Single Event Upset (SEU) induced parameter perturbation (SIPP) on neural networks. We systematically define the fault models of SEU and then provide the definition of sensitivity to SIPP as the robustness measure for the network. We are then able to analytically explore the weakness of a network and summarize the key findings for the impact of SIPP on different types of bits in a floating point parameter, layer-wise robustness within the same network and impact of network depth. Based on those findings, we propose two remedy solutions to protect DNNs from SIPPs, which can mitigate accuracy degradation from 28% to 0.27% for ResNet with merely 0.24-bit SRAM area overhead per parameter . Index T erms --component, formatting, style, styling, insert I. DNNs) have recently attracted enormous attention due to the success in various perception tasks [1], [2] and it is an appealing idea to adopt DNNs in security sensitive systems for in-depth inference and efficient data processing, such as autonomous automobile and medical monitoring. On the other hand, the robustness of DNN itself is of great concern for such security related applications and hence has been widely studied.