Hybrid Convolutional Neural Networks with Reliability Guarantee

Making AI safe and dependable requires the generation of dependable models and dependable execution of those models. We propose redundant execution as a well-known technique that can be used to ensure reliable execution of the AI model. This generic technique will extend the application scope of AI-accelerators that do not feature well-documented safety or dependability properties. Typical redundancy techniques incur at least double or triple the computational expense of the original. We adopt a co-design approach, integrating reliable model execution with non-reliable execution, focusing that additional computational expense only where it is strictly necessary. We describe the design, implementation and some preliminary results of a hybrid CNN.