FORTUNE: A Negative Memory Overhead Hardware-Agnostic Fault TOleRance TechniqUe in DNNs

This paper presents FORTUNE, a hardware-agnostic fault tolerance technique for DNNs that leverages quantization to enhance reliability without significant performance overhead. Unlike conventional methods like Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR), which are computationally expensive, the proposed approach uses memory savings from quantization to protect the critical Most Significant Bit, improving fault tolerance in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Memory utilization has been reduced by 37.5% across all networks, with vulnerability in AlexNet reduced by 56% compared to the 8-bit version and 84% compared to the unprotected 3-bit version. These improvements come with only a minor increase in execution time of less than 3%. Using AlexNet as an example demonstrates how our approach effectively enhances memory utilization and resilience while causing only a minimal increase in execution time.