arXiv:2606.07620cs.CVcs.AI2026-06

提出统计故障注入框架,高效评估视觉Transformer的软错误可靠性。

SENTRY: Statistical Reliability Analysis of Vision Transformers Under Soft Errors

论文配图:SENTRY: Statistical Reliability Analysis of Vision Transformers Under Soft Errors
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 基于有限总体采样理论,用少量样本估算故障率。
  • 仅需数千次实验即达99%置信度,故障率误差<1%。
  • 发现归一化层和浮点指数位是关键脆弱点,适合边缘部署加固。

随着视觉Transformer在自动驾驶、医疗影像等安全关键领域广泛应用,其对软错误的可靠性保障至关重要。尽管ViT具备顶尖准确率,但庞大的参数量使全面故障注入不可行。本文提出一种基于有限总体采样理论的统计故障注入框架,可提供形式化可靠性保证。结果显示,无论模型规模如何,仅需数千次样本即可在99%置信度下将故障率误差控制在1%以内。该方法相比穷举法实验成本降低高达10,700倍,同时仍能定位各架构组件的漏洞。对ViT-Tiny和ViT-Small等架构的广泛评估揭示了高度非均匀的可靠性分布:仅3%的FP32位翻转导致失败,但绝大多数此类事件引发灾难性准确率崩溃。具体脆弱点被定位至归一化层及IEEE-754格式中的关键指数位,为设计抗错的边缘部署式ViT架构提供了数学基础与可操作洞见。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

With the growth of Vision Transformers in safety-critical domains like autonomous systems and medical imaging, ensuring their reliability against soft errors is paramount. While ViTs offer state-of-the-art accuracy, their massive parameter counts render exhaustive fault injection campaigns infeasible. To bridge this gap, a statistical fault injection framework is presented, leveraging finite-population sampling theory to provide formal reliability guarantees. It is demonstrated that failure rates are bounded within a 1% margin at 99\% confidence using only a few thousand samples, regardless of model scale. This methodology achieves up to a 10,700 times reduction in experimental cost compared to exhaustive approaches, while preserving the ability to localize vulnerabilities across architectural components. Through extensive evaluation of different architectures like ViT-Tiny and ViT-Small, a highly non-uniform reliability landscape is uncovered. It is shown that while only 3% of FP32 bit-flips result in failure, the vast majority of these events lead to catastrophic accuracy collapse. Specific vulnerabilities are localized to normalization layers and critical exponent bits within the IEEE-754 format, providing a mathematical foundation and actionable insights for the design of hardened, edge-deployed ViT architectures.

视觉Transformer可靠性分析故障注入边缘计算

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