Evaluating Fault Resiliency of Compressed Deep Neural Networks

Model compression is considered to be an effective way to reduce the implementation cost of deep neural networks (DNNs) while maintaining the inference accuracy. Many recent studies have developed efficient model compression algorithms and implementations in accelerators on various devices. Protecting integrity of DNN inference against fault attacks is important for diverse deep learning enabled applications. However, there has been little research investigating the fault resilience of DNNs and the impact of model compression on fault tolerance. In this work, we consider faults on different data types and develop a simulation framework for understanding the fault resiliency of compressed DNN models as compared to uncompressed models. We perform our experiments on two common DNNs, LeNet-5 and VGG16, and evaluate their fault resiliency with different types of compression. The results show that binary quantization can effectively increase the fault resilience of DNN models by 10000x for both LeNet5 and VGG16. Finally, we propose software and hardware mitigation techniques to increase the fault resiliency of DNN models.