arXiv Machine Learning

What Input Resolution Is Required for Bird Species Identification, and What Is Its Latency Cost on an Edge Device? A Study of 14 Input Resolutions and Six Architectures with On-Device Measurements

arXiv AI
Sep 17

The Inference Engineering Pareto Atlas: Which Optimizations Dominate the Cost, Quality, and Latency Frontier?

The paper presents a Pareto atlas of LLM inference optimizations, mapping cost, quality, and latency trade‑offs for Qwen2.5‑7B‑Instruct on L4, A100, and H100 GPUs. Using 54 measured configurations and a calibrated simulator, it identifies 18 of 36 setups on the Pareto frontier, showing that combined methods outperform single ones. Quality tests reveal that AWQ 4bit and FP8 weights offer significant latency reductions while largely preserving accuracy, but naive FP8 KV caching fails to answer any questions correctly.

By Srikanta Datta Tumkur, Jay Iyer, Mehar Simhadri, Sai Pavan Kumar, Sai Kapil Kumar, Ramesh Nampelly
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 16

FALCON: FPGA-Accelerated Latency-Certifiable Occupancy Networks for Camera-Based Autonomous Driving

FALCON is a camera‑based 3D occupancy front‑end built on the AMD Kria KR260 FPGA that provides explicit latency guarantees for autonomous driving perception. The system uses cycle‑bounded programmable‑logic compute, a measured inference envelope over 100k frames, and a watchdog to flag stale outputs, achieving all 300k proxy frames within a 100 ms deadline plus at most 10.2 ms. On the full FlashOcc pipeline the board attains 29.88 mIoU on the Occ3D‑nuScenes set, matching 92.8 % of an FP32 baseline, while maintaining tighter tail latency than competing Jetson Orin and datacenter GPUs.

By Haohua Que, Mingkai Liu, Handong Yao
arXiv AI
Oct 16

When Does Muon Actually Win? A Paired Data-, Time-, and Tuning-Budget Benchmark

The paper evaluates Muon, a data‑efficient optimizer, against AdamW on a single A100 GPU across 17.7M‑ and 33.6M‑parameter causal language models and a 2.70M‑parameter vision transformer. Using a 23‑candidate development budget and five matched seeds, Muon consistently reduces validation‑loss area under the curve by 3.25–22.44% and lowers test loss in all 20 primary pairs, while AdamW outperforms Muon on language tasks by 3.38–6.96%. Muon’s full optimizer call consumes 56.1–69.6% of training time versus 6.1–9.1% for AdamW, and it shows higher expected regret under restricted candidate pools, indicating trade‑offs between data efficiency and computational cost for small models with reference kernels.

By Mushir Akhtar, Hazem N. Nounou, Majdi Mansouri, Mohamed N. Nounou
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

LESS: Lightweight Evolutionary Supernet Search in Minutes

LESS (Lightweight Evolutionary Supernet Search) is a data‑driven NAS method that uses a brief hard‑path warm‑up and CMA‑ES to evaluate candidate architectures as decoded hard genotypes after six supernet updates. On NAS‑Bench‑201, LESS attains 93.189 % CIFAR‑10 accuracy in just 409.1 seconds, nearly matching FairNAS while using only about 1/24 of its search time. The approach also transfers well to CIFAR‑100, ImageNet16‑120, and the larger DARTS space, achieving high accuracies with searches completed in roughly 43.5 minutes on a single GPU.

By Aviral Gandhi, Jinglue Xu, Jialong Li, Hitoshi Iba