Maximal Brain Damage Without Data or Optimization: Disrupting Neural Networks via Sign-Bit Flips

arXiv:2502.07408v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) can be catastrophically disrupted by flipping only a handful of parameter bits. We introduce Deep Neural Lesion (DNL), a data-free and optimizationfree method that locates critical parameters, and an enhanced single-pass variant, 1P-DNL, that refines this selection with one forward and backward pass on random inputs. We show that this vulnerability spans multiple domains, including image classification, object