When External Numerical Guards Detect Injected Faults in Neural-Network Inference

External guards can withhold an accelerator's output and trigger recovery, but their usefulness depends on which faults their numerical tests detect. We examine software fault-injection campaigns in convolutional networks, a vision transformer, and a decoder language model, distinguishing reported results from independently recounted records. Removing ReLU6 increased reported coverage from 0/155 to 325/326 harmful events at a tested MobileNetV2 site; adding clipping to a ResNet-50 site reduced it from 634/634 to 0/20. These interventions support a causal influence of activation restriction, while also changing which injected faults are harmful. In the BF16 Qwen3-4B RUN07c study, the recounted same-position coverage was 681/727. Recovered multi-boundary records contained 623 same-position harmful events: the first downstream boundary detected 576 and the union detected 577, differing from the smaller count in the supplied manuscript. Weight-only FP8 RUN09 records confirmed no first-boundary or union K20 detections among 288 finite harmful events, whereas BF16 detected 689/750. A separate paired RUN07 completed 780,000 trials using BF16 and per-tensor FP8 weights-and-activations storage with BF16 arithmetic. Its FP8 logit-summary detector detected 0/1,934 finite harmful events, while its internal residual-stream K20 detector did detect 231/1,866. This makes the limitation specific to the detector and numerical contract. We distinguish these observations from a universal observability rule: a bounded operation need not place faulty outputs inside a detector's acceptance region, and an unrestricted path need not make every harmful perturbation detectable. The results motivate graph-informed placement followed by empirical qualification under a declared fault sampler, numerical configuration, profile, and observation scope. They do not establish radiation-event rates, physical containment performance, or protection against persistent cache faults during incremental decoding. Remaining provenance and configuration checks are specified before release. Results are identified as reported or recounted; recounted values were verified against saved trial records in October 2026. Software fault injection alone does not establish radiation or flight readiness.

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Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-10-05
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23146540
Primary Topic
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
Type
preprint
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preprint

When External Numerical Guards Detect Injected Faults in Neural-Network Inference

Serhii Serhieiev, Lidiia Pukhkan
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
preprint

When External Numerical Guards Detect Injected Faults in Neural-Network Inference

Serhii Serhieiev, Lidiia Pukhkan
preprint en

Abstract

External guards can withhold an accelerator's output and trigger recovery, but their usefulness depends on which faults their numerical tests detect. We examine software fault-injection campaigns in convolutional networks, a vision transformer, and a decoder language model, distinguishing reported results from independently recounted records. Removing ReLU6 increased reported coverage from 0/155 to 325/326 harmful events at a tested MobileNetV2 site; adding clipping to a ResNet-50 site reduced it from 634/634 to 0/20. These interventions support a causal influence of activation restriction, while also changing which injected faults are harmful. In the BF16 Qwen3-4B RUN07c study, the recounted same-position coverage was 681/727. Recovered multi-boundary records contained 623 same-position harmful events: the first downstream boundary detected 576 and the union detected 577, differing from the smaller count in the supplied manuscript. Weight-only FP8 RUN09 records confirmed no first-boundary or union K20 detections among 288 finite harmful events, whereas BF16 detected 689/750. A separate paired RUN07 completed 780,000 trials using BF16 and per-tensor FP8 weights-and-activations storage with BF16 arithmetic. Its FP8 logit-summary detector detected 0/1,934 finite harmful events, while its internal residual-stream K20 detector did detect 231/1,866. This makes the limitation specific to the detector and numerical contract. We distinguish these observations from a universal observability rule: a bounded operation need not place faulty outputs inside a detector's acceptance region, and an unrestricted path need not make every harmful perturbation detectable. The results motivate graph-informed placement followed by empirical qualification under a declared fault sampler, numerical configuration, profile, and observation scope. They do not establish radiation-event rates, physical containment performance, or protection against persistent cache faults during incremental decoding. Remaining provenance and configuration checks are specified before release. Results are identified as reported or recounted; recounted values were verified against saved trial records in October 2026. Software fault injection alone does not establish radiation or flight readiness.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
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