Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising supporting architecture providing a variety of resources to the network edge, thus acting as an enabler for edge intelligence services empowering massive mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices with AI capability. With the assistance of edge servers, user equipments (UEs) are able to run deep neural network (DNN) based AI applications, which are generally resource-hungry and compute-intensive, such that an individual UE can hardly afford by itself in real time. However the resources in each individual edge server are typically limited. Therefore, any resource optimization involving edge servers is by nature a resource-constrained optimization problem and needs to be tackled in such realistic context. Motivated by this observation, we investigate the optimization problem of DNN partitioning (an emerging DNN offloading scheme) in a realistic multi-user resource-constrained condition that rarely considered in previous works. Despite the extremely large solution space, we reveal several properties of this specific optimization problem of joint multi-UE DNN partitioning and computational resource allocation. We propose an algorithm called Iterative Alternating Optimization (IAO) that can achieve the optimal solution in polynomial time. In addition, we present rigorous theoretic analysis of our algorithm in terms of time complexity and performance under realistic estimation error. Moreover, we build a prototype that implements our framework and conduct extensive experiments using realistic DNN models, whose results demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency.
Robust DNN Partitioning and Resource Allocation Under Uncertain Inference Time
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心，电子工程系，清华大学）
The state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) have significant computational and data management requirements. The size of both training data and models continue to increase. Sparsification and pruning methods are shown to be effective in removing a large fraction of connections in DNNs. The resulting sparse networks present unique challenges to further improve the computational efficiency of training and inference in deep learning. Both the feedforward (inference) and backpropagation steps in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm for training sparse DNNs involve consecutive sparse ma…
Joint Optimization of Model Partitioning and Resource Allocation for Anti-Jamming Collaborative Inference Systems
College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学信息工程学院）；School of Communications and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学通信与信息工程学院）；Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University College London（伦敦大学学院电子与电气工程系）；Department of Electronic Engineering, Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学电子工程系）；Department of Electronics and Information Convergence Engineering, Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学电子信息融合工程系）
Deep Neural Network (DNN) applications with edge computing presents a trade-off between responsiveness and computational resources. On one hand, edge computing can provide high responsiveness deploying computational resources close to end devices, which may be prohibitive for the majority of cloud computing services. On the other hand, DNN inference requires computational power to be executed, which may not be available on edge devices, but a cloud server can provide it. To solve this problem (trade-off), we partition a DNN between edge device and cloud server, which means the first DNN layers…
Many state-of-the-art Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have substantial memory requirements. Limited device memory becomes a bottleneck when training those models. We propose ParDNN, an automatic, generic, and non-intrusive partitioning strategy for DNNs that are represented as computational graphs. ParDNN decides a placement of DNN's underlying computational graph operations across multiple devices so that the devices' memory constraints are met and the training time is minimized. ParDNN is completely independent of the deep learning aspects of a DNN. It requires no modification neither at the mod…
A Survey on Collaborative DNN Inference for Edge Intelligence
College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学电子与信息工程学院）；Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学计算学系）
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；University of Nevada, Reno（内华达大学里诺分校）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have driven increasing intelligent applications at the network edge, such as smart home, smart factory, and smart city. To deploy computationally intensive Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on resource-constrained edge devices, traditional approaches have relied on either offloading workload to the remote cloud or optimizing computation at the end device locally. However, the cloud-assisted approaches suffer from the unreliable and delay-significant wide-area network, and the local computing approaches are limited by the constrained computing capability. To…
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本-古里安大学）；Facebook（脸书）
The success of deep neural networks (DNNs) is heavily dependent on computational resources. While DNNs are often employed on cloud servers, there is a growing need to operate DNNs on edge devices. Edge devices are typically limited in their computational resources, yet, often multiple edge devices are deployed in the same environment and can reliably communicate with each other. In this work we propose to facilitate the application of DNNs on the edge by allowing multiple users to collaborate during inference to improve their accuracy. Our mechanism, coined {\em edge ensembles}, is based on ha…
AI engineering has emerged as a crucial discipline to democratize deep neural network (DNN) models among software developers with a diverse background. In particular, altering these DNN models in the deployment stage posits a tremendous challenge. In this research, we propose and develop a low-code solution, ModelPS (an acronym for "Model Photoshop"), to enable and empower collaborative DNN model editing and intelligent model serving. The ModelPS solution embodies two transformative features: 1) a user-friendly web interface for a developer team to share and edit DNN models pictorially, in a l…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely applied in mobile intelligent applications. The inference for the DNNs is usually performed in the cloud. However, it leads to a large overhead of transmitting data via wireless network. In this paper, we demonstrate the advantages of the cloud-edge collaborative inference with quantization. By analyzing the characteristics of layers in DNNs, an auto-tuning neural network quantization framework for collaborative inference is proposed. We study the effectiveness of mixed-precision collaborative inference of state-of-the-art DNNs by using Im…
Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）；Rakuten Mobile（乐天移动）；British Telecommunications plc（英国电信股份有限公司）
Partitioning and distributing deep neural networks (DNNs) across end-devices, edge resources and the cloud has a potential twofold advantage: preserving privacy of the input data, and reducing the ingress bandwidth demand beyond the edge. However, for a given DNN, identifying the optimal partition configuration for distributing the DNN that maximizes performance is a significant challenge. This is because the combination of potential target hardware resources that maximizes performance and the sequence of layers of the DNN that should be distributed across the target resources needs to be dete…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Recent advances in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) and Edge Computing have made it possible to automatically analyze streams of videos from home/security cameras over hierarchical clusters that include edge devices, close to the video source, as well as remote cloud compute resources. However, preserving the privacy and confidentiality of users' sensitive data as it passes through different devices remains a concern to most users. Private user data is subject to attacks by malicious attackers or misuse by internal administrators who may use the data in activities that are not explicitly approved by…
The emerging edge-cloud collaborative Deep Learning (DL) paradigm aims at improving the performance of practical DL implementations in terms of cloud bandwidth consumption, response latency, and data privacy preservation. Focusing on bandwidth efficient edge-cloud collaborative training of DNN-based classifiers, we present CDC, a Classification Driven Compression framework that reduces bandwidth consumption while preserving classification accuracy of edge-cloud collaborative DL. Specifically, to reduce bandwidth consumption, for resource-limited edge servers, we develop a lightweight autoencod…
CANS: Accelerating Multiuser Collaborative Edge Inference via Cooperative Autodidactic NeuroSurgeon
Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Shanghai Academy of Artificial Intelligence for Science（上海人工智能科学研究院）
Asteroid: Resource-Efficient Hybrid Pipeline Parallelism for Collaborative DNN Training on Heterogeneous Edge Devices
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Data Science and Analytics Thrust, HKUST (GZ)（香港科技大学（广州）数据科学与分析学域）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) sustain high performance in today's data processing applications. DNN inference is resource-intensive thus is difficult to fit into a mobile device. An alternative is to offload the DNN inference to a cloud server. However, such an approach requires heavy raw data transmission between the mobile device and the cloud server, which is not suitable for mission-critical and privacy-sensitive applications such as autopilot. To solve this problem, recent advances unleash DNN services using the edge computing paradigm. The existing approaches split a DNN into two parts and…
This paper studies inference acceleration using distributed convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in collaborative edge computing network. To avoid inference accuracy loss in inference task partitioning, we propose receptive field-based segmentation (RFS). To reduce the computation time and communication overhead, we propose a novel collaborative edge computing using fused-layer parallelization to partition a CNN model into multiple blocks of convolutional layers. In this scheme, the collaborative edge servers (ESs) only need to exchange small fraction of the sub-outputs after computing each fu…
University of Vaasa（瓦萨大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）
Collaborative inference has received significant research interest in machine learning as a vehicle for distributing computation load, reducing latency, as well as addressing privacy preservation in communications. Recent collaborative inference frameworks have adopted dynamic inference methodologies such as early-exit and run-time partitioning of neural networks. However, as machine learning frameworks scale in the number of inference inputs, e.g., in surveillance applications, fault tolerance related to device failure needs to be considered. This paper presents the Edge-PRUNE distributed com…
School of Data and Computer Science（数据与计算机科学学院）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
As the backbone technology of machine learning, deep neural networks (DNNs) have have quickly ascended to the spotlight. Running DNNs on resource-constrained mobile devices is, however, by no means trivial, since it incurs high performance and energy overhead. While offloading DNNs to the cloud for execution suffers unpredictable performance, due to the uncontrolled long wide-area network latency. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose Edgent, a collaborative and on-demand DNN co-inference framework with device-edge synergy. Edgent pursues two design knobs: (1) DNN partitioning…
Emerging AI-enabled applications such as augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) leverage multiple deep neural network (DNN) models for sub-tasks such as object detection, hand tracking, and so on. Because of the diversity of the sub-tasks, the layers within and across the DNN models are highly heterogeneous in operation and shape. Such layer heterogeneity is a challenge for a fixed dataflow accelerator (FDA) that employs a fixed dataflow on a single accelerator substrate since each layer prefers different dataflows (computation order and parallelization) and tile sizes. Reconfigurable DNN accelerat…
Currently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved a great success in various applications. Traditional deployment for DNNs in the cloud may incur a prohibitively serious delay in transferring input data from the end devices to the cloud. To address this problem, the hybrid computing environments, consisting of the cloud, edge and end devices, are adopted to offload DNN layers by combining the larger layers (more amount of data) in the cloud and the smaller layers (less amount of data) at the edge and end devices. A key issue in hybrid computing environments is how to minimize the system cos…
Manchester Metropolitan University（曼彻斯特城市大学）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）
Deep Neural Network (DNN) models are usually trained sequentially from one layer to another, which causes forward, backward and update locking's problems, leading to poor performance in terms of training time. The existing parallel strategies to mitigate these problems provide suboptimal runtime performance. In this work, we have proposed a novel layer-wise partitioning and merging, forward and backward pass parallel framework to provide better training performance. The novelty of the proposed work consists of 1) a layer-wise partition and merging model which can minimise communication overhea…
Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）；TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）；Wayne State University（韦恩州立大学）
Edge computing offers an additional layer of compute infrastructure closer to the data source before raw data from privacy-sensitive and performance-critical applications is transferred to a cloud data center. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are one class of applications that are reported to benefit from collaboratively computing between the edge and the cloud. A DNN is partitioned such that specific layers of the DNN are deployed onto the edge and the cloud to meet performance and privacy objectives. However, there is limited understanding of: (a) whether and how evolving operational conditions (…
As a key technology of enabling Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in 5G era, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have quickly attracted widespread attention. However, it is challenging to run computation-intensive DNN-based tasks on mobile devices due to the limited computation resources. What's worse, traditional cloud-assisted DNN inference is heavily hindered by the significant wide-area network latency, leading to poor real-time performance as well as low quality of user experience. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose Edgent, a framework that leverages edge computing for…
Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）；University of St Andrews（圣安德鲁斯大学）
Partitioning and deploying Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) across edge nodes may be used to meet performance objectives of applications. However, the failure of a single node may result in cascading failures that will adversely impact the delivery of the service and will result in failure to meet specific objectives. The impact of these failures needs to be minimised at runtime. Three techniques are explored in this paper, namely repartitioning, early-exit and skip-connection. When an edge node fails, the repartitioning technique will repartition and redeploy the DNN thus avoiding the failed nodes…
Optimizing Multi-DNN Inference on Mobile Devices through Heterogeneous Processor Co-Execution
School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University of Technology（安徽工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University（斯德哥尔摩大学计算机与系统科学系）；Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu（塔尔图大学计算机科学研究所）；IISER Berhampur（印度科学教育与研究学院贝尔汉布尔分校）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）；Computer Science School, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院）
Split learning (SL) has been proposed to train deep learning models in a decentralized manner. For decentralized healthcare applications with vertical data partitioning, SL can be beneficial as it allows institutes with complementary features or images for a shared set of patients to jointly develop more robust and generalizable models. In this work, we propose "Split-U-Net" and successfully apply SL for collaborative biomedical image segmentation. Nonetheless, SL requires the exchanging of intermediate activation maps and gradients to allow training models across different feature spaces, whi…
AeroResQ: Edge-Accelerated UAV Framework for Scalable, Resilient and Collaborative Escape Route Planning in Wildfire Scenarios
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学研究院）；Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（信息科学研究所，南加州大学）；Renaissance Computing Institute, University of North Carolina（复兴计算研究所，北卡罗来纳大学）；University of Massachusetts（马萨诸塞大学）
DistrEE: Distributed Early Exit of Deep Neural Network Inference on Edge Devices
School of Computer Science (National Pilot Software Engineering School), Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学计算机学院（国家示范性软件学院））；School of Electronic Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学电子工程学院）
