ALBERTA: ALgorithm-Based Error Resilience in Transformer Architectures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vision Transformers are being increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications that demand high reliability. Ensuring the correct execution of these models in GPUs is critical, despite the potential for transient hardware errors. We propose a novel algorithm-based resilience framework called ALBERTA that allows us to perform end-to-end resilience analysis and protection of transformer-based architectures. First, our work develops an efficient process of computing and ranking the resilience of transformers layers. Due to the large size of transformer models, applying traditional network redundancy to a subset of the most vulnerable layers provides high error coverage albeit with impractically high overhead. We address this shortcoming by providing a software-directed, checksum-based error detection technique aimed at protecting the most vulnerable general matrix multiply (GEMM) layers in the transformer models that use either floating-point or integer arithmetic. Results show that our approach achieves over 99% coverage for errors (single bit-flip fault model) that result in a mismatch with$< $0.2% and$< $0.01% computation and memory overheads, respectively. Lastly, we present the applicability of our framework in various modern GPU architectures under different numerical precisions. We introduce an efficient self-correction mechanism for resolving erroneous detection with an average of less than 2% overhead per error.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".