arXiv Computer Vision

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.

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
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 17

FAME: An FPGA-Based Platform for Approximate Multipliers Evaluation with Pattern-Guided DNN Retraining

FAME is an FPGA-based platform that evaluates approximate multipliers directly in hardware, eliminating slow CPU/GPU LUT emulation and reducing evaluation time for DNN inference. It also introduces a pattern-guided retraining method that uses multiplier-specific patterns to recover accuracy losses. Experiments on ResNet‑18 and MobileNetV2 over ImageNet show up to 3.47× faster multiplier evaluation and a 65.5% accuracy improvement over prior retraining approaches.

By Rappy Saha, Nima Amirafshar, Jude Haris, Nima Taherinejad, Jos\'e Cano
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 24

RAMP: Robust Adaptive Mixed-Precision Quantization for Edge CPU Vision Models

The paper introduces RAMP, a method for robust adaptive mixed‑precision quantization of vision models on edge CPUs. It evaluates 13 sensitivity metrics across four neural networks, finding that Jensen‑Shannon Divergence consistently identifies layers that can be safely quantized. Using K‑Means clustering on these metrics, RAMP achieves near‑lossless accuracy with an average 1.81× speed‑up, while cautioning against excluding low‑speed‑up layers that can fragment the computational graph.

By David Poblaci\'on-Criado, Dario Garcia-Gasulla, Eduardo Quinones