DeepVigor+: Scalable and Accurate Semi-Analytical Fault Resilience Analysis for Deep Neural Network

Growing exploitation of Machine Learning (ML) in safety-critical applications necessitates rigorous safety analysis. Hardware reliability assessment is a major concern with respect to measuring the level of safety. Quantifying the reliability of emerging ML models, including Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), is highly complex due to their enormous size in terms of the number of parameters and computations. Conventionally, Fault Injection (FI) is applied to perform a reliability measurement. However, performing FI on modern-day DNNs is prohibitively time-consuming if an acceptable confidence level is to be achieved. In order to speed up FI for large DNNs, statistical FI has been proposed. However, the run-time for the large DNN models is still considerably long. In this work, we introduce DeepVigor+, a scalable, fast and accurate semi-analytical method as an efficient alternative for reliability measurement in DNNs. DeepVigor+ implements a fault propagation analysis model and attempts to acquire Vulnerability Factors (VFs) as reliability metrics in an optimal way. The results indicate that DeepVigor+ obtains VFs for DNN models with an error less than 1\% and 14.9 up to 26.9 times fewer simulations than the best-known state-of-the-art statistical FI enabling an accurate reliability analysis for emerging DNNs within a few minutes.