Emulating the Effects of Radiation-Induced Soft-Errors for the Reliability Assessment of Neural Networks
International audience; Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are currently one of the most widely used predictive models in machine learning. Recent studies have demonstrated that hardware faults induced by radiation fields, including cosmic rays, may significantly impact the CNN inference leading to wrong predictions. Therefore, ensuring the reliability of CNNs is crucial, especially for safety-critical systems. In the literature, several works propose reliability assessments of CNNs mainly based on statistically injected faults. This work presents a software emulator capable of injecting real faults retrieved from radiation tests. Specifically, from the device characterisation of a DRAM m…
Investigating the Impact of Radiation-Induced Soft Errors on the Reliability of Approximate Computing Systems
International audience; Approximate Computing (AxC) is a well-known paradigm able to reduce the computational and power overheads of a multitude of applications, at the cost of a decreased accuracy. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have proven to be particularly suited for AxC because of their inherent resilience to errors. However, the implementation of AxC techniques may affect the intrinsic resilience of the application to errors induced by Single Events in a harsh environment. This work introduces an experimental study of the impact of neutron irradiation on approximate computing techniques applied on the data representation of a CNN.