As society talks more about artificial intelligence and the role it will play in our future, a key question that NXP is looking at is how to make AI and ML safe in terms of our development processes?
At NXP, we develop a function for our hardware from the formal requirements given by our customer. For these requirements to work, we start by listing some known inputs – these are the use cases. A use case could be the location a radar sensor has in the car (front-facing, corner), the operating voltage of an electric vehicle’s battery or the number of screens in a car’s cockpit. We can then define the design and verify that the function behaves as we are expecting it to—not only in simulation, but also in the field. In the field we are incapable of controlling what the function will actually have as inputs, and we therefore design our functions to be as robust as possible within the chosen use-cases.
But when we talk about AI this changes a little. We still define the use cases, but now we assign to each a clear, defined, non-ambiguous output. This is given to the computer which then defines the function. This process of learning from examples can be referred to as training. We teach the computer to deliver the response we need.
Once the machine is trained on the use cases, we transfer this knowledge to our devices where it applies them to the field with unseen data. This is called inference. The key difference between this process and the non-AI process, is that engineers may not necessarily understand the function itself as we did in the past.
This means that we need to evaluate and adjust the behaviour until the outputs match our original expectations. This adjustment process takes place in the cloud for high-compute devices, not at the edge.
AI and ML will make their way into automotive safety functions and it will be necessary to make sure that there are no violations of the safety goals. If you think about AI and ML in the context of the automotive industry, the question for a car OEM is understanding the level of risk and probable harm to humans from a given function. So, functions are defined to avoid systematic failures and also to reduce random failures. We handle these requirements with our safety management process and our safety architectures that allow device monitoring in human-managed development.
However, just following our existing development process would not be enough because training and inference are inherently different. We therefore need to define different problem statements. To start with, we need to understand if the training data is free from systematic faults. We also need to know how the AI model is created. Does it create unwanted bias that may lead to systematic faults? Finally, during inference, is the execution of the model free from random faults?
For a piece of this, ML assurance comes into play. ML assurance is concerned with the completeness, correctness and coherence of the training and evaluation steps. It covers all of the top level safety processes plus data management. This is to make sure that the data being used is correct, complete and has no bias.
At the inference level, safety mechanisms ensure the integrity of the hardware. These can be any form of hardware core. The classic safety mechanisms with ECC/parity, lockstep and flow monitor features are enhanced by safety wrappers to run additional checks on the data and measure the safety performance statistically.
At NXP, a white paper on the morals of algorithms looks at how NXP views the integrity of AI development and the safety, security and transparency of reliable AI. We have dedicated software called Auto eIQ® to help developers evaluate, optimise and deploy their trained models into our targets. This helps us to continue making the models more robust.
Explore more on safety at nxp.com/functionalsafety.
Andres works as a Functional Safety Assessor in the central NXP team. In the past, Andres has acted as a Safety Architect for radar front-end devices, and also as an Applications Engineer for automotive sensors. He lives in Toulouse, and in his free time he enjoys travelling with his wife, running, and being exposed to unknown situations.
