Error Resilient Machine Learning for Safety-Critical Systems: Position Paper
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Machine learning (ML) has increasingly been adopted in safety-critical systems such as autonomous vehicles (AVs) and industrial robotics. In these domains, reliability and safety are important considerations, and hence it is critical to ensure the resilience of ML systems to faults and errors. On the other hand, soft errors are becoming more frequent in commodity computer systems due to the effects of technology scaling and reduced supply voltages. Further, traditional solutions for masking hardware faults such as Triple-Modular Redundancy (TMR) are prohibitively expensive in terms of their energy and performance overheads. Therefore, there is a compelling need to ensure the resilience of ML applications to soft errors on commodity hardware platforms.We first experimentally assess the resilience of safety-critical ML applications to soft errors. We demonstrate through fault injection experiments that even a single bit flip due to a soft error can lead to misclassification in Deep Neural Network (DNN) applications deployed in AVs, leading to safety violations. However, not all the errors in an DNN will result in serve consequences such as safety violations, and hence it is sufficient to protect the DNN from the ones that do. Unfortunately, finding all possible errors that result in safety violations is a very compute intensive task. We propose BinFI, a fault injection approach that efficiently injects critical faults that are highly likely to result in safety violations, based on the unique properties of DNNs. Finally, we propose Ranger, an approach to protect DNNs from critical faults with minimal performance overheads and no accuracy loss. We will conclude by presenting some of our ongoing work, and the future challenges in this area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".