PRISM: Sensitivity-Aware PolynoMial PRuning for EffIcient Neural Network Encryption

Structured pruning is essential for making neural network inference feasible under homomorphic encryption (HE), yet its impact on model reliability has remained unexplored. This paper presents a systematic reliability characterization of pruned CKKS-encrypted neural networks and introduces Polynomial-Sensitivity-Aware Pruning (PSAP), a structured pruning method that is inherently reliability-aware. PSAP scores filters jointly by weight magnitude, polynomial activation sensitivity, and rotation cost, which concentrates pruning in fault-tolerant regions. Across two architectures, two datasets, two numerical representations, and five bit-error rates (40 full-model and 108 per-layer experiments), PSAP-pruned models limit catastrophic (>10 pp accuracy drop) layers to at most two versus 5--14 for magnitude-pruned baselines, reducing worst-case vulnerability by up to 29 times under int32 bit-flip injection. Direct CKKS encrypted fault injection indicates a safe operating boundary near BER~ 10^{-5}, supporting int32 injection as a conservative reliability proxy. The fault-critical structural layers account for only 1.1% of parameters, enabling selective hardening at minimal overhead. These reliability gains are obtained alongside competitive efficiency: PSAP reduces Halevi--Shoup rotations by up to 45.2\% on ResNet-32, and an adaptive mixed-degree allocation scheme lowers multiplicative depth from 66 to 56 levels, enabling leveled inference without bootstrapping.

Fusion: A Framework for Unified Sequential Token AdaptatIon in VisiOn TraNsformers

Vision Transformers achieve strong image classification accuracy but process all image regions with nearly the same computation, even when many regions are redundant or uninformative. Recent adaptive inference methods reduce this cost by selectively compressing tokens or terminating inference early, but combining these mechanisms often causes unstable intermediate representations and accuracy degradation. We introduce Fusion, a unified adaptive inference framework that coordinates token merging, early exiting, and token pruning through a simple staged design: tokens are merged first, confidence is evaluated next, and pruning is applied only to samples that continue inference. This ordering allows the three mechanisms to operate cooperatively rather than competitively. Fusion further includes lightweight routing modules that adapt compression strength to each input and support inference-time adjustment of the accuracy--latency trade-off without retraining. On ImageNet-1k with DeiT-S, Fusion matches or surpasses state-of-the-art adaptive ViT methods at comparable compute budgets while reducing calibration error by up to $4\times$ and inference energy by $48\%$. Experiments across ImageNet-100, CIFAR-100, and ImageNette with multiple ViT backbones demonstrate consistent transferability without dataset-specific tuning.

Data-Driven Probabilistic Fault Detection and Identification via Density Flow Matching

Fault detection and identification (FDI) is critical for maintaining the safety and reliability of systems subject to actuator and sensor faults. In this paper, the problem of FDI for nonlinear control-affine systems under simultaneous actuator and sensor faults is studied. We model fault signatures through the evolution of the probability density flow along the trajectory and characterize detectability using the 2-Wasserstein metric. In order to introduce quantifiable guarantees for fault detectability based on system parameters and fault magnitudes, we derive upper bounds on the distributional separation between nominal and faulty dynamics. The latter is achieved through a stochastic contraction analysis of probability distributions in the 2-Wasserstein metric. A data-driven FDI method is developed by means of a conditional flow-matching scheme that learns neural vector fields governing density propagation under different fault profiles. To generalize the data-driven FDI method across continuous fault magnitudes, Gaussian bridge interpolation and Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) conditioning are incorporated. The effectiveness of our proposed method is illustrated on a spacecraft attitude control system, and its performance is compared with an augmented Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) baseline. The results confirm that trajectory-based distributional analysis provides improved discrimination between fault scenarios and enables reliable data-driven FDI with a lower false alarm rate compared with the augmented EKF.

An FPGA-Based SoC Architecture with a RISC-V Controller for Energy-Efficient Temporal-Coding Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer high energy efficiency and event-driven computation, ideal for low-power edge AI. Their hardware implementation on FPGAs, however, faces challenges due to heavy computation, large memory use, and limited flexibility. This paper proposes a compact System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture for temporal-coding SNNs, integrating a RISC-V controller with an event-driven SNN core. It replaces multipliers with bitwise operations using binarized weights, includes a spike-time sorter for active spikes, and skips noninformative events to reduce computation. The architecture runs fully on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, achieving up to 16x memory reduction for weights and lowering computational overhead and latency, with 97.0% accuracy on MNIST and 88.3% on FashionMNIST. This self-contained design provides an efficient, scalable platform for real-time neuromorphic inference at the edge.

RESQ: A Unified Framework for REliability- and Security Enhancement of Quantized Deep Neural Networks

This work proposes a unified three-stage framework that produces a quantized DNN with balanced fault and attack robustness. The first stage improves attack resilience via fine-tuning that desensitizes feature representations to small input perturbations. The second stage reinforces fault resilience through fault-aware fine-tuning under simulated bit-flip faults. Finally, a lightweight post-training adjustment integrates quantization to enhance efficiency and further mitigate fault sensitivity without degrading attack resilience. Experiments on ResNet18, VGG16, EfficientNet, and Swin-Tiny in CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and GTSRB show consistent gains of up to 10.35% in attack resilience and 12.47% in fault resilience, while maintaining competitive accuracy in quantized networks. The results also highlight an asymmetric interaction in which improvements in fault resilience generally increase resilience to adversarial attacks, whereas enhanced adversarial resilience does not necessarily lead to higher fault resilience.

SPARQ: Spiking Early-Exit Neural Networks for Energy-Efficient Edge AI

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer inherent energy efficiency due to their event-driven computation model, making them promising for edge AI deployment. However, their practical adoption is limited by the computational overhead of deep architectures and the absence of input-adaptive control. This work presents SPARQ, a unified framework that integrates spiking computation, quantization-aware training, and reinforcement learning-guided early exits for efficient and adaptive inference. Evaluations across MLP, LeNet, and AlexNet architectures demonstrated that the proposed Quantised Dynamic SNNs (QDSNN) consistently outperform conventional SNNs and QSNNs, achieving up to 5.15% higher accuracy over QSNNs, over 330 times lower system energy compared to baseline SNNs, and over 90 percent fewer synaptic operations across different datasets. These results validate SPARQ as a hardware-friendly, energy-efficient solution for real-time AI at the edge.

HAWX: A Hardware-Aware FrameWork for Fast and Scalable ApproXimation of DNNs

This work presents HAWX, a hardware-aware scalable exploration framework that employs multi-level sensitivity scoring at different DNN abstraction levels (operator, filter, layer, and model) to guide selective integration of heterogeneous AxC blocks. Supported by predictive models for accuracy, power, and area, HAWX accelerates the evaluation of candidate configurations, achieving over 23* speedup in a layer-level search with two candidate approximate blocks and more than (3*106)* speedup at the filter-level search only for LeNet-5, while maintaining accuracy comparable to exhaustive search. Experiments across state-of-the-art DNN benchmarks such as VGG-11, ResNet-18, and EfficientNetLite demonstrate that the efficiency benefits of HAWX scale exponentially with network size. The HAWX hardware-aware search algorithm supports both spatial and temporal accelerator architectures, leveraging either off-the-shelf approximate components or customized designs.

AdAM: Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Approximate Multiplier for Edge DNN Accelerators

In this paper, we propose an architecture of a novel adaptive fault-tolerant approximate multiplier tailored for ASIC-based DNN accelerators.

SAFFIRA: a Framework for Assessing the Reliability of Systolic-Array-Based DNN Accelerators

Systolic array has emerged as a prominent architecture for Deep Neural Network (DNN) hardware accelerators, providing high-throughput and low-latency performance essential for deploying DNNs across diverse applications. However, when used in safety-critical applications, reliability assessment is mandatory to guarantee the correct behavior of DNN accelerators. While fault injection stands out as a well-established practical and robust method for reliability assessment, it is still a very time-consuming process. This paper addresses the time efficiency issue by introducing a novel hierarchical software-based hardware-aware fault injection strategy tailored for systolic array-based DNN accelerators.

Exploration of Activation Fault Reliability in Quantized Systolic Array-Based DNN Accelerators

The stringent requirements for the Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) accelerator's reliability stand along with the need for reducing the computational burden on the hardware platforms, i.e. reducing the energy consumption and execution time as well as increasing the efficiency of DNN accelerators. Moreover, the growing demand for specialized DNN accelerators with tailored requirements, particularly for safety-critical applications, necessitates a comprehensive design space exploration to enable the development of efficient and robust accelerators that meet those requirements. Therefore, the trade-off between hardware performance, i.e. area and delay, and the reliability of the DNN accelerator implementation becomes critical and requires tools for analysis. This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for exploring and enabling a holistic assessment of the trilateral impact of quantization on model accuracy, activation fault reliability, and hardware efficiency. A fully automated framework is introduced that is capable of applying various quantization-aware techniques, fault injection, and hardware implementation, thus enabling the measurement of hardware parameters. Moreover, this paper proposes a novel lightweight protection technique integrated within the framework to ensure the dependable deployment of the final systolic-array-based FPGA implementation. The experiments on established benchmarks demonstrate the analysis flow and the profound implications of quantization on reliability, hardware performance, and network accuracy, particularly concerning the transient faults in the network's activations.