SAR: Sharpness-Aware minimization for enhancing DNNs’ Robustness against bit-flip errors

As Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical scenarios, there is a growing need to address bit-flip errors occurring in hardware, such as memory. These errors can lead to changes in DNN weights, potentially degrading the performance of deployed models and causing catastrophic consequences. Existing methods improve DNNs’ fault tolerance or robustness by modifying network size, structure, or inference and training processes. Unfortunately, these methods often enhance robustness at the expense of clean accuracy and introduce additional overhead during inference. To address these issues, we propose Sharpness-Aware Minimization for enhancing DNNs’ Robustness against bit-flip errors (SAR), which aims to leverage the intrinsic robustness of DNNs. We begin with a comprehensive investigation of DNNs under bit-flip errors, yielding insightful observations regarding the intensity and occurrence of such errors. Based on these insights, we identify that Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has the potential to enhance DNN robustness. We further analyze this potential through the relationship between SAM formulation and our observations, building a robustness-enhancing framework based on SAM. Experimental validation across various models and datasets demonstrates that SAR can effectively improve DNN robustness against bit-flip errors without sacrificing clean accuracy or introducing additional inference costs, making it a “double-win” method compared to existing approaches.