arXiv Machine Learning

Sustainable Edge Vision via Empirically Calibrated DVFS: Eliminating Thermal Throttling on Passively Cooled Hardware

The paper presents an empirically calibrated, state‑aware Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) scheduler that eliminates thermal throttling on a passively cooled Raspberry Pi 5 during sustained YOLOv8n inference. By using time‑domain guards, absolute temperature bounds, and derivative triggers, the scheduler outperforms a temperature‑only baseline with a 6.8% higher frame rate and 1.9% less energy per frame, and it surpasses an actively cooled reference in energy efficiency. The study also identifies that the passive operating envelope closes at ambient temperatures above 27 °C, where nonlinear leakage undermines DVFS control, and demonstrates that correct scheduling can make mechanical cooling unnecessary within the mapped envelope.

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
Jun 24

EnerInfer: Energy-Aware On-Device LLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 23001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-device LLM inference is increasingly attractive for privacy-preserving, reliable, and cost-effective deployment, yet its energy and thermal costs remain a critical bottleneck.

By Bohua Zou, Nian Liu, Binqi Sun, Matteo Mascherin, Debayan Roy, Yutao Liu, Yu Peng, Ning Jia, Haibo Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

Beyond Noise: Understanding and Overcoming Temperature Effects in Analog DNN Inference

The paper investigates how temperature affects analog deep neural network (DNN) inference, focusing on both stochastic and systematic non‑idealities in analog hardware. Experiments show that temperature‑induced performance loss is mainly driven by systematic errors rather than random noise. The study evaluates various mitigation techniques, finding that noise‑aware training and temperature‑aware calibration—especially hardware‑in‑the‑loop training—best preserve inference accuracy across different thermal conditions.

By Niklas Summ, Xiao Wang, Hendrik Borras, Bernhard Klein, Holger Fr\"oning
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

One Simple Trick for Improving the Performance of Energy-Limited Local Inference and Training

The paper proposes a simple technique of chunking workloads into smaller parts that alternate between compute-intensive and memory-bound operations to smooth power and temperature spikes in GPU systems. By doing so, it prevents throttling, leading to faster wall-clock times and lower total energy consumption. Experiments on a DGX Spark show up to 2% performance and energy gains, while similar benefits, though smaller, are observed on multi‑GPU servers.

By Erik Schultheis, Maximilian Kleinegger, Dan Alistarh