Characterizing and Improving Resilience of Accelerators to Memory Errors in Autonomous Robots
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Motion planning is a computationally intensive and well-studied problem in autonomous robots. However, motion planning hardware accelerators (MPA) must be soft-error resilient for deployment in safety-critical applications, and blanket application of traditional mitigation techniques is ill suited due to cost, power, and performance overheads. We propose Collision Exposure Factor (CEF), a novel metric to assess the failure vulnerability of circuits processing spatial relationships, including motion planning. CEF is based on the insight that the safety violation probability increases with the surface area of the physical space exposed by a bit-flip. We evaluate CEF on four MPAs. We demonstrate empirically that CEF is correlated with safety violation probability and that CEF-aware selective error mitigation provides 12.3×, 9.6×, and 4.2× lower dangerous Failures-In-Time rate on average for the same amount of protected memory compared to uniform, bit-position, and access-frequency-aware selection of critical data. Furthermore, we show how to employ CEF to enable fault characterization using 23,000× fewer fault injection (FI) experiments than exhaustive FI and evaluate our FI approach on different robots and MPAs. We demonstrate that CEF-aware FI can provide insights on vulnerable bits in an MPA while taking the same amount of time as uniform statistical FI. Finally, we use the CEF to formulate guidelines for designing soft-error resilient MPAs.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it