A Radiation-Hardened, Fault-Aware Quantized Neural Network That Self-Heals

Deep learning (DL) models are increasingly being deployed into radiation-challenging environments in spacecraft, particle accelerators, and, soon, space-based data centers. Instantiated as a learned orchestration of numbers stored in persistent memory, models are susceptible to continual degradation as high-energy particles corrupt data. At inference time, new data passed through the network fundamentally break the off-line assumptions and guarantees of a static model determined during training. To preserve the quality and efficacy of the models, fault tolerance against bit flips is a clear objective. In this work we developed a runtime method for repairing the quantized weights of neural networks (NNs) after bit flips on commodity, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, without storing extra replicas. Our work extends the well-established Fault-Aware Training (FAT) paradigm by adding an alignment penalty to concentrate undamaged activations and weights into a low-rank subspace, and we then reconstruct flagged corrupted coordinates from the uncorrupted survivors. We call this method Projection Healing and apply it to six regression benchmarks on quantized NNs. Holding a FAT checkpoint fixed and toggling only the runtime heal gives a further about 23% reduction in the native-unit excess integral. Across those datasets the method extends the operational scrub interval by a median of 2.04 times at a +5% RMSE degradation and 1.96 times at +50%, compared with 1.62 times and 1.07 times for classical Single Error Correction, Double Error Detection (SECDED). This introduces a new path towards designing resilient data-driven models, complementing established hardware redundancy, ECC, and FAT-based techniques.