arXiv Computer Vision

Vision Transformers on the Edge: A Comprehensive Survey of Model Compression and Acceleration Strategies

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

FlexViT: A Flexible FPGA-based Accelerator for Edge Vision Transformers

arXiv:2606. 31938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying Vision Transformer (ViT) models on edge platforms remains challenging due to their high computational demands and the architectural heterogeneity of modern hybrid ViT models, which incorporate both fully connected and convolutional layers.

By Hubert Dymarkowski, Xingjian Fu, Rappy Saha, Jude Haris, Jos\'e Cano
arXiv Computer Vision
5d ago

EdgeCrafter: Compact ViTs for Edge Dense Prediction via Task-Specialized Distillation

EdgeCrafter presents a compact Vision Transformer framework tailored for edge dense prediction tasks such as object detection, instance segmentation, and human pose estimation. By employing task-specialized distillation and an edge-friendly encoder-decoder design, the ECDet backbone achieves 51.7 box AP with under 10 M parameters, while its extensions reach 48.4 mask AP and 74.8 keypoint AP using only COCO annotations. Pretraining on Objects365 further boosts performance, demonstrating that lightweight ViTs can compete with CNN-based models on resource-constrained devices.

By Longfei Liu, Yongjie Hou, Yang Li, Qirui Wang, Youyang Sha, Yongjun Yu, Yinzhi Wang, Peizhe Ru, Xuanlong Yu, Xi Shen
arXiv AI
Aug 25

TEE-X: TEE-aware Acceleration Framework for Large Vision Models at the Edge

TEE-X is a TEE‑aware acceleration framework designed to run large vision models, such as Vision Transformers, entirely within Trusted Execution Environments. It introduces a sensitivity‑aware modularization technique and vectorization to overcome memory constraints and latency challenges on edge devices. The framework is validated on OP‑TEE for Arm TrustZone and optimized for the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier, achieving GPU‑level inference latency with minimal accuracy‑latency trade‑offs.

By Kurt M Wilson, Mohaiminul Al Nahian, Abeer Matar A. Almalky, Sadat Shahriyar, Souvik Kundu, Zhishan Guo, Abdullah Al Arafat, Adnan Siraj Rakin
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Benchmarking Model Compression Techniques Across Heterogeneous Edge Platforms: A Predictive Maintenance Use Case for Rotating Machinery

The paper evaluates four advanced model compression methods on a high‑performance convolutional neural network for predictive maintenance of rotating machinery. Using a real‑world dataset, the authors benchmarked the compressed models on nine diverse edge devices, balancing classification accuracy, inference speed, and compression ratio. Knowledge distillation emerged as the most effective technique, delivering over 90% speedup, a 98.9% size reduction, and only a minor drop in balanced F‑score (91.22%) compared to the uncompressed model.

By Matheus Calheira Guimar\~aes de Oliveira, Marco Aur\'elio da Silva Cruz, Regis Cardoso, Lucas Cambuim, Rafael Macieira, Arthur Paim, Helaine Neves, Alex Santos, Lilian Guarieiro, Jean Schmith, Prashant Kumar, Erick G. Sperandio Nascimento
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

GaLe: memory-efficient Global Approximate and Local Exact features

GaLe is a memory‑efficient technique that allows pretrained neural networks to run on resource‑constrained devices without retraining. It splits feature maps into a local exact component that keeps fine details and a global approximate component that preserves long‑range dependencies, enabling global operations and attention mechanisms typical of hybrid CNN‑transformer models. On ImageNet, GaLe matches exact‑inference accuracy while delivering up to 65% speedup and 90% RAM reduction on a Cortex‑M33, and it works across classification, detection, and generation tasks.

By Alberto Ancilotto, Elisabetta Farella
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Evolving Layer-Specific Scalar Functions for Hardware-Aware Transformer Adaptation

The paper introduces a hardware‑aware framework that uses genetic programming to evolve layer‑specific scalar functions for Vision Transformers, replacing traditional LayerNorm with efficient, heterogeneous approximations. By applying a post‑training re‑alignment strategy, the method eliminates the need for full model retraining while achieving 90‑93% variance capture and recovering over 84% of ImageNet‑1K Top‑1 accuracy for ViT‑B and ViT‑L. The resulting architecture removes the global reduction bottleneck, reducing arithmetic complexity and off‑chip memory traffic, thereby enabling efficient deployment of ViTs on edge accelerators.

By Kieran Carrigg, Sigur de Vries, Amirhossein Sadough, Marcel van Gerven