arXiv AI

Joint Optimization of Memory and Computing Frequency for Energy-Efficient DNN Inference

arXiv:2608. 13863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural network (DNN) inference on mobile devices often incurs high latency and energy consumption due to limited computing and memory resources.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

GQ-FSL: Green Quantized Federated Split Learning Framework for Wireless Edge Networks

The paper introduces GQ-FSL, a green quantized federated split learning framework designed for wireless edge networks. It uses stochastic quantization for both local training and wireless transmissions, allowing asymmetric precision between client and server submodels to balance device energy limits with global convergence. The authors develop energy models and a convergence bound for heterogeneous data, then formulate an optimization problem to set the DNN split point and precision levels, achieving lower energy consumption while meeting latency and accuracy targets.

By Idan Roth, Lutz Lampe
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 14

Adaptive AI: Energy Efficient Multi-exit TinyML on Intelligent Vision Systems at the Edge

The paper presents a novel multi‑exit computational scheme for TinyML on an ultra‑low‑power GAP9 SoC, adding confidence‑based gating points to a MobileNetV2 CNN for ImageNet‑100. By allowing inference to stop early, the approach cuts average MAC operations by 41 % (from 313 MMAC to 185 MMAC), reduces inference time by 29 % (49 ms to 35 ms), and saves 24 % in energy (2.1 mJ to 1.6 mJ per frame) with only a ~1 % drop in accuracy. Compared to a state‑of‑the‑art adaptive CNN on the same hardware, the method more than doubles computational efficiency, raising MAC/cycle from 8.1 to 17.2.

By Luca Crupi, Lorenzo Lamberti, Alessandro Giusti, Daniele Palossi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

The Battery Price of edge AI: A study of the Environmental Impact of LLM Inference on Mobile Devices

The paper investigates the environmental impact of running large language models (LLMs) on mobile devices. It evaluates 18 different LLM configurations on two smartphones and a server, measuring energy per token, latency, accuracy, and battery-cycle consumption. Findings reveal that on-device inference is about three times less energy‑efficient than batched server inference, that energy consumption varies non‑monotonically with quantization bit‑width, and that most models are not on the Pareto front of accuracy and energy efficiency. The study concludes that local AI is not inherently more sustainable than cloud inference, with the majority of environmental impact stemming from device embodied carbon.

By \'Edouard Gu\'egain, Tristan Coignion
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Node-wise Feature Encoding for Neural Performance Prediction

FeatureFormer is a neural performance predictor that adds explicit node-wise encodings of FLOPs, parameter counts, and memory proxies to a gated graph attention architecture. It is designed to improve latency and energy prediction for neural networks on edge devices, addressing the limitation of existing GNN and transformer predictors that largely ignore node-level computational cost. The authors also introduce NNEQ, a large-scale energy consumption dataset, and show through extensive experiments that FeatureFormer achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance across both metrics, including challenging out‑of‑domain settings, while the encoding can broadly enhance existing predictors with negligible overhead.

By Matthew Grenier, William Hammer, Andrew Heuer, Nikhil Krishna, Yi Wang, Ramtin Zand
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Radio-Frequency Convolutional Neural Networks

The paper introduces Radio‑Frequency Convolutional Neural Networks (RF‑CNNs), which repurpose the frequency mixer in wireless radios to perform convolutional neural network inference directly on edge devices. By mapping multi‑channel convolutions onto frequency tones, the passive mixer can execute the entire operation in a single pass, enabling deep CNNs with up to 26.4 million parameters and nine layers to run on smartphones, wearables, and drones. Experimental results show near full‑precision performance while reducing energy consumption to 0.72 fJ per multiply‑accumulate—two orders of magnitude lower than adding a digital processor. "whyItMatters":"The approach leverages existing radio hardware to deliver efficient, state‑of‑the‑art AI inference on billions of devices without increasing size, weight, power, or cost."

By Zhihui Gao, Shi-Yuan Ma, Yiran Chen, Dirk Englund, Tingjun Chen