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Paper

TESTING March 05, 2026

Scalable Digital Compute-in-Memory Ising Machines for Robustness Verification of Binary Neural Networks

Authors

Madhav Vadlamani, Rahul Singh, Yuyao Kong, Zheng Zhang, Shimeng Yu

Abstract

Verification of binary neural network (BNN) robustness is NP-hard, as it can be formulated as a combinatorial search for an adversarial perturbation that induces misclassification. Exact verification methods therefore scale poorly with problem dimension, motivating the use of hardware-accelerated heuristics and unconventional computing platforms, such as Ising solvers, that can efficiently explore complex energy landscapes and discover high-quality solutions. In this work, we reformulate BNN robustness verification as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem and solve it using a digital compute-in-memory (DCIM) SRAM-based Ising machine. Instead of requiring globally optimal solutions, we exploit imperfect solutions produced by the DCIM Ising machine to extract adversarial perturbations and thereby demonstrate the non-robustness of the BNN. The proposed architecture stores quantized QUBO coefficients in approximately 9.1~Mb of SRAM and performs annealing in memory via voltage-controlled pseudo-read dynamics, enabling iterative updates with minimal data movement. Experimental projections indicate that the proposed approach achieves a $178\times$ acceleration in convergence rate and a $1538\times$ improvement in power efficiency relative to conventional CPU-based implementations.

Metadata

arXiv ID: 2603.05677
Provider: ARXIV
Primary Category: cs.ET
Published: 2026-03-05
Fetched: 2026-03-09 06:05

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