Edge Inference
Momentum
17 papers in the last four weeks, up 240% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.
Latest papers 123
Multi-camera streaming perception is increasingly deployed on heterogeneous edge platforms shared with co-resident workloads, yet accelerator placement is often evaluated using isolated single-stream experiments and mean streaming average precision (sAP). Using two end-to-end pipelines on a single GPU--NPU platform, we show that isolated evaluation can mis-rank deployment-time placement. Although the GPU pipeline is preferred in isolation, GPU-localized contention introduces deadline misses that make detections stale and can reverse the preferred placement before full GPU saturation. The NPU pipeline is less accurate than the GPU pipeline on small and medium objects in isolation, but nearly matches it on large objects. The largest absolute sAP losses in our latency and contention experiments occur for large objects. In our four-stream experiments, the preferred placement depends on which path becomes stale, and increasing GPU-side contention shifts the best placement from All-GPU to All-NPU. Under a GPU-saturating vision--language co-tenant, All-NPU achieves the worst-stream sAP of All-GPU. Because mean sAP can hide severe single-stream degradation, evaluation should report contention sweeps, deadline-miss rates on both paths, and worst-stream sAP alongside mean sAP.
Embedded Bi-Temporal Building Damage Assessment for On-Board Data Reduction
Rapid assessment of building damage after natural disasters is essential to support emergency response. Earth Observation satellites can acquire relevant imagery shortly after an event, but exploitation is limited by uplink and downlink capacity and by ground-processing latency. We address this with a bi-temporal building damage assessment pipeline built on a siamese detector derived from YOLOX, designed to compress information at both ends of the ground/space link. On the ground, pre-disaster reference images are encoded into a compact latent space -- compressed by up to a factor of 64 -- and uplinked to the satellite. On board, this reference is compared with a fresh post-disaster acquisition so that the downlink carries only actionable object-level products, bounding boxes and damage classes, instead of full scenes. This cuts the data exchanged in both directions, while on xBD the strongly compressed reference still preserves most of the detection performance. Because on-board acquisitions suffer from residual pre/post co-registration errors, we introduce a latent-space shift estimation and correction module that regresses the global offset from the coarse feature level and realigns the post-disaster features before fusion. It substantially improves robustness to de-registration -- especially under large shifts, where fusion-only variants collapse -- while also raising nominal accuracy and remaining compatible with the strongest compression. We finally port the pipeline to two embedded targets, a Xilinx Versal VCK190 and an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, and report hardware performance (latency, throughput, power efficiency). The core detector and its compression port cleanly to both, but the operators needed for long-range robustness survive only on the Jetson GPU, whereas the Versal DPU does not.
A packet-level digital hardware twin for commissioning megahertz diagnostic edge AI and plasma control system integration in tokamaks
High-bandwidth plasma diagnostics increasingly provide inputs to machine learning and signal-processing algorithms intended for real-time tokamak control, but the complete path from diagnostic sampling to control-system handoff is difficult to commission because of their sampling rates. We develop a packet-level digital hardware twin for the megahertz diagnostic edge-AI architecture. The simulator represents a 64-channel, 1 MHz beam emission spectroscopy (BES) diagnostic embedded in a 96-channel dual-carrier acquisition system, two 48-channel streams with SPAD0 sample counters, 10 GbE Hardware UDP transport, packet loss and network jitter, FPGA parsing and dual-carrier alignment, causal preprocessing and edge inference, a compact Ethernet result packet, receiver-side shared state, and a 1 kHz PCS-like control cycle. Binary UDP payloads and PCAP files are generated rather than emulating transport only at the array level. With a baseline of 20 samples per packet, each carrier generates 50,000 packets s and 100 MB s of user payload. A 110 ms reference run produces 11,000 HUDP packets; an intentionally dropped 20-sample packet is detected by the sample-counter continuity logic and invalidates the two overlapping 128-sample inference windows without silent interpolation. For valid windows, the configured engineering latency model gives a median last-input-to-shared-memory latency of 91.6 us and a 99th percentile of 108.1 us. A separate operating-system loopback test sends binary FPGA-result datagrams through a UDP receiver into POSIX shared memory and preserves packet sequence and CRC for 20/20 packets. Interactive GUI interfaces expose timing, packetization, network faults, inference thresholds, and control-state inspection. The framework provides a reproducible environment for testing diagnostic-to-accelerator interfaces and fail-safe behavior for deployment on fusion devices.
RAMP: Robust Adaptive Mixed-Precision Quantization for Edge CPU Vision Models
Deploying deep learning models on edge CPUs is bottlenecked by computational and memory constraints. Mixed-precision quantization promises to reduce inference latency while preserving accuracy. However, quantization affects different layer types in inconsistent ways, so identifying where accuracy loss is minimized and latency reduction is maximized is critical, as the effect accumulates over a full deployment into substantial savings or unacceptable task degradation. Such identification relies on sensitivity metrics, proxies that estimate layer-wise degradation without evaluating the task accuracy of every candidate policy. Nevertheless, widely used metrics fail systematically on modern architectures. We present a systematic empirical study of 13 sensitivity metrics for layer-wise INT8 quantization across four distinctly different neural networks, and validate the resulting policies on two ARM64 platforms. Gradient-based sensitivity methods fail on 4 out of 8 model-hardware configurations and weight-based statistics on 2. In contrast, the Jensen-Shannon Divergence achieves zero catastrophic failures, reliably isolating the layers that cannot be safely quantized. A sensitivity metric alone does not define a policy, and the fixed thresholds typically used for that step are fragile over the highly skewed distributions of modern architectures. We address this with K-Means clustering, achieving near-lossless accuracy and a mean speed-up of over the full-precision model. Finally, we reveal that excluding from quantization the layers whose speed-up is negligible, regardless of their sensitivity, can be counterproductive, as it induces computational graph fragmentation and disables operator fusion. Our results yield concrete allocation policies for practitioners and researchers deploying quantized vision models on heterogeneous edge CPUs, without GPU access or gradient computation.
GTR: Gated Token Recurrence for Efficient Dense Prediction
Self-attention-based vision backbones perform well on dense prediction, but the quadratic computational cost of global softmax attention limits their efficiency as image resolution increases. We introduce Gated Token Recurrence (GTR), a softmax-free recurrent vision backbone that combines gated linear attention, alternating spatial scan directions, and spatially enhanced SwiGLU blocks. GTR is distilled from a detection-specialized DINOv3 teacher using only final-layer patch-token alignment through a linear projection and squared loss, without masked-token prediction or intermediate-layer supervision. With Objects365 detector pre-training, GTR-L achieves 58.9 box AP on COCO \texttt{val2017} with 1.908,ms median batch-one latency under compiled FP16 execution on an RTX4090. The same backbone also transfers to instance segmentation, pose estimation, oriented detection, semantic segmentation, and monocular depth estimation. In an isolated kernel benchmark, our specialized chunkwise CUDA operator is faster than FLA v0.5.0 at 1.6K tokens on RTX4090. TensorRT deployment on DRIVE AGX Thor achieves 2.282--8.769,ms median batch-one latency across the evaluated models. These results show that recurrent token mixing can provide an efficient alternative to global softmax attention for high-resolution dense prediction and edge deployment. Project page: https://intellindust-ai-lab.github.io/projects/GTR/
Empirical Auditing of Edge-Private Graph Generators
We empirically audit privacy leakage by testing whether outputs from edge-neighbouring inputs remain distinguishable, using statistically valid lower bounds on the privacy loss witnessed by our attacks. Our framework compares direct-edge, local-structural, and GNN-based attacks through the geometry surrounding a target edge. Experiments across two generators and two networks show that privacy leakage is both mechanism- and network-dependent, with learned representations revealing information not captured by conventional local statistics.
Cross-Architecture Foundation-Model Distillation for Edge Flood Segmentation
Geospatial foundation models can provide strong flood-segmentation performance, but their size limits deployment on memory-constrained edge hardware. We distill a 300-million-parameter Prithvi-EO-2.0 teacher, fine-tuned on the 252 manually labeled Sen1Floods11 training scenes, into a 0.7-million-parameter EfficientViT-B0 student. The teacher supervises additional unlabeled Sentinel-2 imagery, allowing the student training set to grow without new manual annotations. At the matched budget of 252 scenes, teacher-supervised training is competitive with direct training and improves STURM-Flood performance across tested configurations; a geometry-matched control shows that label source alone does not explain the difference. Scaling the teacher-supervised pool to 2,500 scenes narrows the remaining student--teacher gap: the float student reaches 0.787 water intersection over union on the Sen1Floods11 test split against 0.822 for the teacher, matches the teacher on STURM-Flood under our evaluation protocol, and remains below it on WorldFloods-v2. After activation replacement and quantization-aware training, the student runs as a 1.5-megabyte 8-bit integer (INT8) TensorRT engine on a Jetson Xavier NX at 5.57 milliseconds of graphics processing unit (GPU) compute per 512-by-512 image, with approximately 14 megabytes of runtime device memory. A fixed modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI) threshold is competitive with both models on the two clean external benchmarks, so we interpret those benchmarks as generalization tests rather than as evidence of learned-model superiority over a spectral rule. The results support the conclusion: foundation-model supervision can amplify a fixed manual annotation budget into a substantially larger training set and yield a compact, deployable edge model.
Radio-Frequency Convolutional Neural Networks
Running artificial intelligence (AI) models directly on edge devices such as smartphones, wearables, and drones offers low latency, pervasive scalability, and data privacy, but these devices rarely carry the computing capability that modern neural networks demand. Edge accelerators have been developed in response, yet each adds computing hardware to devices already constrained in size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C). An alternative lies in what these devices already carry: the frequency mixer in every wireless radio multiplies signals in time, natively performing convolution in the frequency domain. Here we introduce radio-frequency convolutional neural networks (RF-CNNs), which repurpose existing communication hardware for CNN inference. Multi-channel convolutions are mapped onto frequency tones for a passive mixer to execute in a single pass. We experimentally demonstrate that RF-CNN runs deep CNNs up to 26.4 million parameters and nine layers from classification of wireless signals and images to controllable image generation, close to full-precision performance. Because the weights arrive over the air and the analog hardware is shared with communication, the edge device spends energy only on data preparation and readout-down to 0.72 femtojoules per multiply-accumulate, two orders of magnitude less than it would cost on an added digital processor. These results suggest that deployed wireless infrastructure can bring efficient, state-of-the-art AI inference to the billions of devices it already connects.
Event-based Selective Attention for Multi-resolution Fast Region of Interest (ROI) Detection
Neuromorphic vision systems operate under strict constraints on bandwidth, memory, and energy, particularly at the edge, motivating early mechanisms for data reduction and selective processing. In this work, we investigate a multi-scale training-free, saliency-based, bottom-up visual attention model that operates directly on low-resolution event-based input and selects Regions of Interest (ROI) from the visual scene. The model is evaluated across multiple downscaling factors applied to the incoming event stream, with input resolutions reduced by up to 256x relative to full resolution. Performance is assessed on the Prophesee Automotive dataset, the largest publicly available event-based dataset, demonstrating robust ROI selection across different scales on a real-world use-case. The proposed approach is capable of detecting ROIs belonging to multiple object classes, including various vehicle types, pedestrians, traffic lights, and traffic signs, with accuracy up to 70.8%, while operating at millisecond temporal resolution, 16x finer than the temporal resolution provided by the dataset ground truth. These results highlight the potential of combining early event downscaling with saliency-based attention as an effective front-end for efficient edge neuromorphic vision systems.
Carry-Through Checksum: A Lightweight Fault-Detection for CNN Inference at the Edge
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical edge applications, where soft errors can silently corrupt inference outputs and lead to unsafe decisions. Such applications typically rely on resource-constrained embedded GPUs, requiring fault detection and mitigation techniques that add minimal compute, memory, and latency overhead while integrating seamlessly with the standard GPU inference pipeline. Existing algorithm-based fault tolerance techniques rely on matrix augmentation and per-operation checksum verification, imposing substantial overhead that is prohibitive for CNN inference on embedded GPUs. In this work, we propose carry-through checksum, a fundamentally new scheme for soft-error detection in CNN inference on embedded GPUs. The method embeds dedicated carry-through filters into the convolutional layers, which compute a checksum from the CNN's own operations and propagate it through inference, enabling end-to-end error detection with a single output verification. Experimental results on multiple CNN architectures show that the proposed method detects 95.86% and 86.56% of critical faults for FP32 and FP16, respectively, at almost no additional per-image overhead. Detected faults are mitigated through re-execution, incurring only 2.27% run-time overhead across the entire test set on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX GPU.
Proportional-Fair Resource Allocation and Dual-Threshold Early-Exit Inference for Secure Cooperative Multi-Layer Edge Intelligence
This paper proposes FREDI (Fair Resource Allocation for Edge Dual-Threshold Inference), a secure wireless edge-intelligence framework for event-triggered inference in a cooperative user equipment (UE)--edge server (ES)--cloud system. Each UE performs early-exit convolutional neural network (CNN) screening using dual confidence thresholds, while critical events are securely offloaded to an edge server for detailed classification. We formulate a proportionally-fair utility maximization problem that jointly optimizes UE--ES association, wireless and processing resources, and confidence thresholds. FREDI decomposes the problem into proportional-fair resource allocation and dual-threshold inference optimization. We prove that the detected-critical event set is set-monotone non-increasing in both thresholds, and exploit the finite empirical confidence domain for exact threshold optimization. An empirical resource--utility response envelope yields a computable global suboptimality bound and a sufficient condition for global optimality. By pre-eliminating infeasible UE--ES pairs and exactly projecting out bandwidth and transmit-power variables, the resource-allocation subproblem is reduced to a mixed-integer exponential-cone program solvable to the certified global optimality within a prescribed gap. Numerical results with early-exit MobileNetV2 and ShuffleNetV2 demonstrate near-perfect UE fairness with aggregate utility close to a Sum-Utility benchmark, reveal security-induced resource fragmentation, and demonstrate the Stage-A scalability from 6 to 144 UEs with median solving time below 0.1~s in the tested configurations.
A 25-s/inf Event-driven Graph Neural Network Processor with Spatiotemporal Caching and Spline Convolution for Ultra-low-latency AI at the Edge
Dynamic-vision-sensor (DVS) cameras generate events on a per-pixel basis with a s-level temporal resolution, calling for new algorithm-hardware co-design approaches compared to standard frame-based vision. While event-driven graph neural networks (EV-GNNs) emerge as a promising algorithmic solution, they raise new HW challenges by mixing dense-regular compute operations and sparse-irregular memory accesses. We present ETHEREAL, the first EV-GNN accelerator that scales to 640480 resolutions, thanks to a neighbor-parallel spline convolution engine and a 2D/3D-split memory hierarchy with a novel region-of-interest spatiotemporal caching mechanism. Measurement results demonstrate end-to-end inference with 25.6s latency and 1.7J energy per event on state-of-the-art workloads
Adaptive AI: Energy Efficient Multi-exit TinyML on Intelligent Vision Systems at the Edge
Traditional TinyML systems for edge devices achieve high accuracy by relying on fixed-depth models that require a constant number of multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations regardless of the input complexity. This approach wastes critical resources in battery-powered Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and limits the real-time performance of edge cyber-physical systems. Multi-exit execution schemes mitigate these issues and are widely used on high-end devices such as GPUs, but are rarely exploited on edge IoT devices because they require substantial rethinking given their strict memory and computational constraints. We address these aspects by designing and deploying, on an ultra-low-power GWT GAP9 System-on-Chip (SoC), a novel multi-exit computational scheme, demonstrating it on a MobileNetV2 convolutional neural network (CNN) for the ImageNet-100 classification task. Our approach introduces multiple exits at different CNN depths, each with a confidence-based gating mechanism that dynamically and autonomously decides whether to continue or stop inference. Comparing our multi-exit strategy to the standard MobileNetV2 on a GAP9 SoC, we show a 41% reduction in the average computational cost (from 313 MMAC to 185 MMAC), a 29% lower inference time (from 49 to 35 ms), and an energy saving of 24% (from 2.1 to 1.6 mJ per frame). All these improvements come with a ~1% loss in accuracy compared to the full-depth MobileNetV2, which achieves 80.5%. Finally, comparing our adaptable multi-exit scheme with a third-party state-of-the-art adaptive CNN, also deployed on the GAP9, we achieve more than 2x its computational efficiency, increasing it from 8.1 to 17.2 MAC/cycle.
BRIDGE-EEG: Bridging Self-Supervised Pretraining and Efficient Deployment for Cross-Dataset EEG Classification
The growing use of electroencephalography (EEG) motivates automated analysis that is accurate, transferable, and deployable on constrained hardware. Recent EEG foundation models learn general representations from large-scale pretraining, but their size and computational cost limit edge and wearable deployment. We introduce BRIDGE-EEG, an efficient multi-task EEG classification pipeline that preserves the benefits of pretraining while reducing model size. A unified preprocessing scheme maps heterogeneous recordings with different channel counts, montages, and sampling rates to a device-agnostic 62-channel time--frequency representation. We pretrain an SE-ResNet18 teacher (11.84 M parameters) with SimCLR on unlabeled EEG from five heterogeneous datasets, then compress it into SE-ResNet8 (1.56 M) and SE-ResNet4 (0.48 M) students using task-agnostic and task-specific distillation. We evaluate six benchmarks spanning abnormality detection, motor imagery, and emotion recognition. For abnormality detection and emotion recognition, the students achieve accuracy comparable to or better than several recent EEG foundation models with 10--1,000 more parameters. Motor imagery shows a remaining representation gap, highlighting the importance of pretraining diversity. Inference profiling on a server GPU, desktop CPU, and NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano shows up to 3.0 lower edge energy per inference (15.64 mJ vs. 46.67 mJ). The compact models further support future deployment on MCU-class wearables.
Input Resolution Matters: Real-Time Object Detection Latency
We model total latency as the convolution of preprocessing, inference, and postprocessing distributions under a simplifying independence approximation, with selected stage parameters expressed as functions of source-image resolution. Under this assumption, the probability density of the total latency is the convolution of the stage-wise densities, and its cumulative distribution function (CDF) provides the distribution of end-to-end detection time. Each stage is modeled by a parametric distribution (e.g., Exponential, Erlang, Normal, Gamma), with parameters expressed as functions of the source-image resolution. Experiments with YOLOv11n on NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX using COCO2017 images across multiple resolutions assess the proposed models against fixed-parameter baselines using Kolmogorov Smirnov, Anderson Darling, and Cram'er von Mises statistics. The results indicate that resolution-aware parameterization can improve distributional approximation in the measured setting, particularly for the more flexible Normal and Gamma models, while the quality of fit remains distribution dependent. Our contribution is a theoretically grounded and lightweight formulation for studying resolution-dependent latency distributions in a measured object detection pipeline.
Elastoformer: Enabling Dynamic Adaptivity via Elastic Model Transformation
EdgeAI systems are increasingly employing computer vision applications to enable intelligent, on-device decision-making in real-time. However, these deployments face highly dynamic operational conditions, with fluctuating constraints on latency, power availability, and memory resources. Deep Neural Networks (DNN), which follow fixed computational execution flows, lack the flexibility to adapt to such variability, resulting in inefficient and suboptimal performance in edge scenarios. This underscores the need for architectures that are not only efficient but also dynamically scalable at runtime. In this paper, we propose Elastoformer: A framework that transforms conventional neural networks (NN) into Elastic NN capable of real-time elastic inference. Unlike the conventional bag-of-models approach, which requires maintaining multiple independent models for different operating conditions, Elastoformer offers a single, modular solution that dynamically switches between multiple modes of operation at runtime, adapting efficiently to the changing computational budgets of edge devices without the overhead of managing separate models. Experiments reveal that our framework achieves up to 85% reduction in computation FLOPs, 50% reduction in latency and 76% reduction in memory overhead, while showcasing the architecture agnostic nature of the framework across both Vision Transformers and CNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/sudaksh14/Elastoformer.
JEDI: JEPA-to-Edge Distillation for Efficient Cropland Segmentation from Satellite Imagery
Large vision models provide useful representations for remote-sensing segmentation but are often too expensive for deployment at the satellite or field edge. Existing feature-level distillation methods also tend to assume similar teacher and student architectures and often stop feature alignment when task training begins. We introduce JEDI (JEPA-to-Edge Distillation), a two-stage framework that transfers representations from a large I-JEPA Vision Transformer teacher to a compact SegFormer student. First, JEDI aligns the student's terminal representation with the teacher's token space using cross-architecture projection and spatial alignment. It then jointly optimizes supervised segmentation, temperature-scaled response distillation, and persistent feature alignment throughout task adaptation. On CalCROP21, JEDI-B0 achieves 68.0 mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) with 4.04M parameters, improving over the standalone student by 16.0 points and coming within 2.0 points of the 70.0 mIoU achieved by the 639M-parameter teacher. We evaluate SegFormer B0, B1, and B2 students with 4.04M, 14.33M, and 28M parameters, respectively. Across all three variants, JEDI consistently outperforms response-, structure-, channel-, and relational-distillation baselines under the same teacher-student setting. These results show that persistent representation alignment is especially valuable under aggressive compression, substantially reducing model size and computation while preserving segmentation performance.
Preprocessing Failure and Adversarial Detection in Depthwise-Separable Edge Vision Systems
Preprocessing-based defenses are the standard first-line response to adversarial attacks on edge vision systems, requiring no retraining, no architectural changes, and widely recommended as model-agnostic mitigations. Yet the foundational evaluations of these defenses were conducted on residual or Inception-class architectures, not on the depthwise-separable CNNs that dominate edge deployments. This untested assumption leaves a gap in the security evaluation literature. This paper closes that gap by evaluating six preprocessing defenses against adversarial perturbations across both architecture families. Across all perturbation levels and defenses tested, the two depthwise-separable architectures show consistently poor recovery while the residual architecture shows partial recovery; ablation results are consistent with an architectural rather than parametric explanation, though only three architectures and one attack family are evaluated. Crucially, this failure is not merely a negative result. The same output divergence that disqualifies preprocessing as a recovery mechanism reveals a detection opportunity: preprocessing consistently disrupts clean predictions while leaving adversarial predictions largely unchanged, an asymmetry that is directly measurable without retraining or architectural modification. We further show that standard image quality metrics are unreliable proxies for defense effectiveness, a methodological gap in current evaluation practice. A practitioner decision framework is provided for adversarially resilient edge vision deployment.
LipCache: A Local Inference Proxy with Certified Caching for Edge Image Classification Service
As edge-side vision services continue to expand toward low-latency, high-throughput scenarios, reducing the inference cost of vision models without sacrificing reliability has become a central concern. Existing semantic caching methods largely rely on empirical similarity thresholds; while such thresholds improve hit rates, they tend to introduce silent misclassifications near decision boundaries. To address this, we propose \texttt{LipCache}, a certified semantic caching framework for image classification. Without modifying the existing deployed main model, \texttt{MainNet}, the framework introduces a lightweight network, \texttt{GuardNet}, that maps inputs into a low-dimensional feature space subject to a Lipschitz constraint. It then computes a per-sample certified reuse radius from the local classification margin and the spectral norm of the classification head. At runtime, a cached result is reused only when the query feature falls inside the certified reuse ball; otherwise, the query falls back to \texttt{MainNet}. Thus, cache hits are transformed from empirical threshold tests into geometric certification decisions with explicit theoretical boundaries. Across standard image classification tasks like CIFAR, Tiny-ImageNet, and SVHN, \texttt{LipCache} achieves a measured speedup of up to with limited end-to-end accuracy degradation, while all accepted cache hits satisfy the \texttt{GuardNet}-side certified-consistency condition. Furthermore, an enhanced \texttt{GuardNet} training recipe substantially improves cache hit rates in the Tiny-ImageNet multi-class extension while maintaining a certified-consistency rate of . These results demonstrate that per-sample certified reuse can reduce main-model fallback while preserving theoretical consistency, providing a feasible approach to reliable cache-assisted inference at the edge.
Achieving Near-Zero-Overhead Multi-Model Hierarchical Classification in Real-Time Detection Pipelines
Edge-deployed vision systems in target recognition, surveillance, autonomous vehicles, and drone domains require hierarchical inference pipelines where a detection model identifies objects of interest and downstream classifiers provide fine-grained attribute analysis. Running all models on the GPU creates a serial bottleneck that limits real-time throughput as pipeline stages grow. Modern edge SoCs pair GPUs with dedicated neural accelerators (NPUs, DLAs) capable of concurrent execution, yet deploying custom models on these accelerators remains impractical due to strict operator constraints, quantization incompatibilities, and an undocumented end-to-end pipeline. We target NVIDIA Jetson DLA cores as the representative platform. We present a five-step methodology for zero GPU fallback DLA INT8 deployment of classification backbones, comprising architecture adaptation, manual dynamic range workaround to rescue TensorRT's implicit quantization (recovering 94.0% accuracy from implicit quantization's 75%) for rapid pipeline validation before explicit quantization, quantization-aware training, ONNX graph surgery for DLA compilation, and a concurrent GPU-detection/DLA-classification inference pipeline. We document nine engineering constraints with root-cause analysis and generalizable solutions. Validation on a dual-head person attribute classifier running on DLA alongside a GPU object detector on a Jetson Orin NX demonstrates near-zero pipeline overhead (12.5 vs. 13.3~FPS detector-only at 1080p), with dual-DLA scaling at no additional cost. The methodology is backbone-agnostic and generalizes to any detection-classification edge pipeline.
APEX: Adaptive Expert Prefetching for Memory-Efficient Edge MoE Inference
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are attractive for edge deployment because they provide high model capacity while activating only a small subset of parameters per token, improving compute efficiency. However, MoE inference at the edge is fundamentally limited by memory. Expert parameters are large and often reside in off-chip memory due to capacity, cost, and power constraints, putting expert loading to the critical path. We present APEX: Adaptive Expert Prefetching, a predictive resource management framework that overlaps expert loading with useful computation. APEX introduces a lightweight prefetch router that predicts candidate experts before the attention block to dynamically fetch additional experts using a learned confidence model. This adaptive strategy achieves over 99% overlap accuracy, significantly outperforming fixed top-k prefetching techniques. APEX supports two execution modes: a correctness-preserving mode that guarantees exact routing semantics, and a stall-free mode that eliminates residual stalls by operating on available experts with negligible impact on application accuracy. Across multiple MoE models, the correctness-preserving mode reduces per-token latency by up to 26% and improves energy-delay product (EDP) by up to 41% over state-of-the-art baselines, while the stall-free mode provides additional efficiency gains with negligible impact on application accuracy. These results establish adaptive, confidence-driven expert prefetching as an effective approach for efficient MoE inference on edge systems.
A Semantic Communication Approach to Fiducial Marker Processing in 5G-Enabled Edge SLAM
Autonomous robots increasingly rely on edge computing to offload computationally intensive perception tasks while maintaining real-time operation over 5G networks. However, conventional fiducial marker detection pipelines provide limited opportunities for efficient task partitioning, making them poorly suited for communication-aware edge deployment. This paper proposes a semantic split inference framework for fiducial marker processing in 5G-enabled Edge SLAM. A DeepTag-inspired convolutional neural network is partitioned between the robot and the edge server, where intermediate feature representations serve as task-oriented semantic information transmitted over the wireless link. The framework is integrated into a ROS2-based robotic architecture and characterized over a real 5G communication testbed. Experimental results demonstrate accurate keypoint estimation, illustrate the impact on downstream pose estimation, and quantify the communication--computation trade-offs associated with different split points, providing practical insights for communication-aware deployment of deep visual perception in connected robotic systems.
CoDAT: Collaborative Dual-Attention Transformer with Low-Cost Temporal Modeling for Efficient Edge Action Recognition
Real-time human action recognition on Internet-of-Things (IoT) edge devices requires models that capture rich spatio-temporal cues within strict latency, memory, and power envelopes. Current 3D CNNs, video transformers, and shift-based ViT deliver high accuracy but come at computational costs that preclude edge IoT deployment. This paper proposes CoDAT, a Collaborative Dual-Attention Transformer that replaces conventional multi-head attention with a lightweight dual-branch module: Spatial Convolutional Attention (SCA) for local aggregation and Strided Single-Head Attention (SSHA) for global context. SSHA jointly compresses the spatial resolution and channel dimensions of the query, key, and value tensors via stride-based sparse projection, then fuses the resulting global and local features at a markedly reduced cost. To enable temporal communication across frames, a parameter-free TShift module is embedded in each block. Extensive experiments on Jetson AGX Orin and Raspberry Pi 5 demonstrate that CoDAT achieves an energy-accuracy balance in both image and action recognition. On ImageNet-1K, CoDAT-M runs 2x faster than EfficientViT384 and FastViT-S12 at comparable accuracy, and CoDAT-L matches ViT-S with 3x fewer parameters at 2x higher throughput. On Kinetics-400 and MA-52, CoDAT achieves competitive Top-1 accuracy against state-of-the-art CNN, transformer, and hybrid baselines while running up to 2.9x faster than VSwin-T, 2x faster than ViT-Temporal-Shift variants, and 5x faster than UniFormer-B. On UCF-101, CoDAT-S384 matches TokShift and LAPS while being 6x faster and requiring up to 13x fewer FLOPs, establishing an efficiency-accuracy balance for real-time action recognition in edge IoT perception systems. Code is available at https://github.com/novendrastywn/CoDAT .
An active-learning framework for real-time depth perception from monocular vision streams
Biological visual systems can perceive depth from monocular vision flow, continuously integrating temporal visual cues while maintaining a balance between stability and plasticity in dynamic environments. In contrast, artificial perception models deployed on resource-constrained edge devices are typically trained in a static offline manner and remain frozen after deployment, often suffering severe performance degradation under domain shifts. While large-scale models may encode broad knowledge through massive parameter redundancy, lightweight networks face a static optimization dilemma: forcing compact models to learn universal geometric representations is computationally inefficient and often leads to performance saturation. To resolve this issue, an Online Active Learning (OAL) mechanism is introduced to endow compact neural networks with the capability to adapt continuously during operation. A closed-loop Predict-Evaluate-Correct learning paradigm is established to actively select high-confidence, information-rich signals from streaming visual input. Crucially, Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) is employed not merely to prevent catastrophic forgetting, but to enforce Selective Plasticity, preserving parameters that encode globally relevant structural knowledge while allowing local alignment to newly observed environments. Built upon a MobileNetV3-Small backbone, the proposed system achieves approximately a 75% reduction in computational cost while maintaining competitive depth estimation accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that adaptability is not solely determined by model size, but rather by how effectively parameter plasticity is regulated in dynamic environments.
TopoCompress: Topology Aware Token Compression Algorithm for Distributed Edge MoE Inference
Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models improve capacity with moderate overhead by sparsely activating experts per token. However, deploying MoE across resource-constrained edge servers incurs substantial cross-server communication as experts are distributed across heterogeneous servers. Existing placement methods optimize for raw token traffic, while conventional compression considers semantics but ignores topology-dependent routing costs. Consequently, independent optimization leads to inefficient communication and resource utilization. This paper proposes TopoCompress, a deployment- and topology-aware token compression framework for communication-efficient distributed edge MoE inference. It jointly optimizes token compression, expert deployment/replication, GPU-CPU residency, and collaborative routing to balance cross-server transmission, quality, and resource use. To address the coupling between token-level compression and epoch-level deployment, TopoCompress employs a two-timescale alternating optimization. In the online fast loop, it identifies and compresses low-importance, high-routing-cost tokens and jointly routes surviving expert activations. In the offline slow loop, it updates expert placement, replication, and GPU-CPU residency according to post-compression traffic accumulated during online inference. We establish the feasibility, optimality, convergence, and computational complexity. Simulations demonstrate that TopoCompress effectively reduces cross-server traffic and deployment resource consumption while maintaining controllable inference quality, enabling efficient distributed MoE inference over bandwidth- and resource-constrained edge infrastructures.
HetRoute Heterogeneous and Cost-aware Collaborative Routing Framework for Distributed Edge MoE Inference
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become a dominant architecture for large-scale AI services, yet deploying them over geo-distributed heterogeneous edge servers remains challenging. When the Top-k activated experts of a token are spread across multiple servers, the optimal routing depends jointly on cross-server link bandwidth, heterogeneous GPU computing capability, GPU-CPU expert loading delay, instantaneous queueing backlog, and replica-level quantization quality loss. Existing distributed inference and MoE serving methods address these factors separately and do not provide a unified framework for online multi-server collaborative routing. In this paper, we propose HetRoute, a heterogeneous-cost-aware collaborative routing framework for distributed edge MoE inference. HetRoute introduces a unified per-assignment cost model that explicitly captures four cost components: cross-server transmission, GPU-CPU offloading, GPU computation with queueing, and quantization-induced quality penalty. Guided by this model, the offline stage determines expert server placement, GPU-CPU residency, and replica precision through a routing-cost-coupled deployment algorithm, while the online stage routes the Top-k activated expert set as a whole by minimizing the bottleneck layer cost via exact enumeration or beam search. Theoretical analysis establishes fallback feasibility, a bound on the number of participating servers, per-layer optimality for small candidate domains, and online computational complexity. Trace-driven evaluation on three MoE models over a heterogeneous 10-server edge testbed shows that HetRoute reduces average inference latency by up to 59.0% and P99 latency by up to 58.0%, cuts cross-server traffic by up to 72.1%, and achieves 2.13x throughput improvement compared with representative baselines, while keeping quality degradation within the configured budget.
TrimMoE A communication aware and adaptive depth framework for distributed edge inference
Serving Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language models across distributed edge servers is bottlenecked by the cross-server expert transmission. The existing approaches mainly focus on how to reach a remote expert faster. However, in this paper, we instead consider whether a given layer, and the layers after it, need to be executed at all. To this end, a communication-aware adaptive-depth framework is proposed in this paper, termed TrimMoE, which couples layer skipping and confidence-based early exit with substitute execution and server-expert selection under a unified quality budget. Specifically, in the offline stage, TrimMoE freezes the backbone, trains the lightweight per-layer exit heads, calibrates the per-layer importance thresholds, and allocates the expert replicas by a skip/exit-aware redundancy benefit. In the online stage, a transition-aware look-ahead anticipates the token movement, so that the depth reduction targets the costliest transmissions, and besides, two feedback rules adapt the delay-quality weights and the exit threshold. Moreover, we prove that the substitution-and-skipping proxy degradation never exceeds the configured budget, and that the early exit is admitted only under a calibrated confidence gate. On a heterogeneous 10-server testbed with Switch-Base-8E, Qwen-MoE-A2.7B, and Mixtral-8x7B, TrimMoE reduces the average latency by up to 62.8%, lowers the cross-server traffic and the remote-execution ratio, and sustains high throughput under load, while keeping the task-quality degradation within a 2% bound.
OrEdge: Efficient Multi-Modal Anomaly Detection in Distributed Software Systems via Orthogonal-Domain Learning
We introduce Orthogonal-Edge (OrEdge), a lightweight framework for real-time anomaly detection in multi-modal distributed software systems. Unlike existing approaches that rely on computationally expensive attention- and graph-based architectures, OrEdge leverages orthogonal-domain temporal representations to achieve accurate anomaly detection with substantially lower computational complexity and model size. It jointly analyzes heterogeneous monitoring data, including logs, metrics, and traces, to identify abnormal software behavior, capture temporal dependencies, and reduce redundancy across observability signals. At its core, OrEdge incorporates OrEdgeCore, a lightweight orthogonal-domain reconstruction module that captures recurring temporal patterns while suppressing transient variations. Evaluated on three real-world microservice datasets (MSDS, SN, and TT), OrEdge achieves competitive detection performance while reducing the reconstruction model size to at most 9.6K parameters, compared with 20K--143K parameters in existing methods. This compact design enables efficient deployment on resource-constrained edge devices: on Raspberry Pi platforms, OrEdge achieves sub-second inference and reduces inference latency by over an order of magnitude compared with existing approaches. Extensive ablation studies, sensitivity analyses, orthogonal basis evaluations, and qualitative case studies further validate the effectiveness of each design component. Overall, OrEdge demonstrates that orthogonal-domain temporal modeling provides an effective alternative to computationally intensive attention- and graph-based architectures, achieving a favorable balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency for real-time multi-modal anomaly detection in edge environments. The code is available at https://github.com/theamrzaki/MicroService_Twin_Original.
When Fish Look Alike: Tracking Identities with Dual-branch Elasticity
Tracking dense, homogeneous targets like schooling fish remains a major challenge for multiple object tracking due to extreme inter-individual homogeneity, severe physical clustering, and rapid non-rigid deformations. While heavy-backbone separated detection and embedding trackers like SU-T push accuracy boundaries using complex Re-Identification networks, their computational overhead prohibits edge deployment. Furthermore, these modules often fail when appearance features degrade under severe occlusions. To overcome this, we propose Tracking Identities with Dual-branch Elasticity (TIDE). Bypassing expensive appearance cues, TIDE utilizes the Adaptive Geometric Correspondence IoU, an association mechanism leveraging spatial and structural consistency to robustly handle complex morphological variations. Crucially, TIDE introduces system-level deployment elasticity, decoupling the algorithmic pipeline from strict hardware constraints. Evaluations on the MFT-Edge benchmark demonstrate that our Lightweight L-branch achieves a competitive HOTA of 28.43 using merely 20.47G FLOPs. This represents a 38.7-fold computational reduction compared to upper bounds like SU-T, directly facilitating real-time edge deployment. Concurrently, our Scalable S-branch establishes a 29.98 HOTA, successfully bridging the gap between high-precision cloud analysis and efficient edge tracking. The dataset and codes are released at https://vranlee.github.io/TIDE/.
Lightweight Image Classification of Raptor Species for Edge Devices: Rare-Species Dataset Expansion via Video Frame Extraction, Knowledge Distillation, and TensorRT Deployment
We investigate lightweight raptor-species classification for real-time edge deployment in wind-turbine collision mitigation. Using DINOv2-L (304M parameters) as a teacher, we distilled three lightweight students (MobileNetV4, ViT-Small, and EfficientNet-B0). To reduce confusion between closely related species, we expanded the dataset to 12,519 images, including an increase in Steller's Sea Eagle images from 463 to 2,050 via video-frame extraction. Under a group split that separates samples at the video- and source-image level to mitigate source leakage at that granularity, the three-student ensemble achieved a macro recall of 0.935 +/- 0.004 over five distillation seeds (0.955 on a conventional image-level split, retaining 97.5% of the teacher's macro recall) with roughly one-eighth as many parameters. On a subset of 1,258 images disjoint from the former training images, White-tailed Eagle recall improved by up to 38.6 percentage points, while the rate at which it was misclassified as the Steller's Sea Eagle decreased from 61% to 15% of errors. TensorRT FP16 deployment of EfficientNet-B0 on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano achieved 3.19 ms/image including host-device transfer (313 images/s), with 99.95% argmax agreement with FP32. In five-seed controlled comparisons, neither distillation (versus CE-only) nor the change from a DINOv2-L to a DINOv3-L teacher yielded a clear ensemble-level improvement; the primary gains stem from the dataset expansion and teacher re-fine-tuning.