Self-Checking Deep Neural Networks in Deployment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The widespread adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in important domains raises questions about the trustworthiness of DNN outputs. Even a highly accurate DNN will make mistakes some of the time, and in settings like self-driving vehicles these mistakes must be quickly detected and properly dealt with in deployment. Just as our community has developed effective techniques and mechanisms to monitor and check programmed components, we believe it is now necessary to do the same for DNNs. In this paper we present DNN self-checking as a process by which internal DNN layer features are used to check DNN predictions. We detail SelfChecker, a self-checking system that monitors DNN outputs and triggers an alarm if the internal layer features of the model are inconsistent with the final prediction. SelfChecker also provides advice in the form of an alternative prediction. We evaluated SelfChecker on four popular image datasets and three DNN models and found that SelfChecker triggers correct alarms on 60.56% of wrong DNN predictions, and false alarms on 2.04% of correct DNN predictions. This is a substantial improvement over prior work (SelfOracle, Dissector, and ConfidNet). In experiments with self-driving car scenarios, SelfChecker triggers more correct alarms than SelfOracle for two DNN models (DAVE-2 and Chauffeur) with comparable false alarms. Our implementation is available as open source.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.049 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
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".