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Users on edge generate deep inference requests continuously over time. Mobile/edge devices located near users can undertake the computation of inference locally for users, e.g., the embedded edge device on an autonomous vehicle. Due to limited computing resources on one mobile/edge device, it may be challenging to process the inference requests from users with high throughput. An attractive solution is to (partially) offload the computation to a remote device in the network. In this paper, we examine the existing inference execution solutions across local and remote devices and propose an adaptive scheduler, a BPS scheduler, for continuous deep inference on collaborative edge intelligence. By leveraging data parallel, neurosurgeon, reinforcement learning techniques, BPS can boost the overall inference performance by up to 8.2× over the baseline schedulers. A lightweight compressor, FF, specialized in compressing intermediate output data for neurosurgeon, is proposed and integrated into the BPS scheduler. FF exploits the operating character of convolutional layers and utilizes efficient approximation algorithms. Compared to existing compression methods, FF achieves up to 86.9% lower accuracy loss and up to 83.6% lower latency overhead. 

Deep neural network (DNN) inference poses unique challenges in serving computational requests due to high request intensity, concurrent multi-user scenarios, and diverse heterogeneous service types. Simultaneously, mobile and edge devices provide users with enhanced computational capabilities, enabling them to utilize local resources for deep inference processing. Moreover, dynamic inference techniques allow content-based computational cost selection per request. This paper presents Dystri, an innovative framework devised to facilitate dynamic inference on distributed edge infrastructure, thereby accommodating multiple heterogeneous users. Dystri offers a broad applicability in practical environments, encompassing heterogeneous device types, DNN-based applications, and dynamic inference techniques, surpassing the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches. With distributed controllers and a global coordinator, Dystri allows per-request, per-user adjustments of quality-of-service, ensuring instantaneous, flexible, and discrete control. The decoupled workflows in Dystri naturally support user heterogeneity and scalability, addressing crucial aspects overlooked by existing SOTA works. Our evaluation involves three multi-user, heterogeneous DNN inference service platforms deployed on distributed edge infrastructure, encompassing seven DNN applications. Results show Dystri achieves near-zero deadline misses and excels in adapting to varying user numbers and request intensities. Dystri outperforms baselines with accuracy improvement up to 95 ×. 

While recent work explored streaming volumetric content on-demand, there is little effort on live volumetric video streaming that bears the potential of bringing more exciting applications than its on-demand counterpart. To fill this critical gap, in this paper, we propose MetaStream, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first practical live volumetric content capture, creation, delivery, and rendering system for immersive applications such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. To address the key challenge of the stringent latency requirement for processing and streaming a huge amount of 3D data, MetaStream integrates several innovations into a holistic system, including dynamic camera calibration, edge-assisted object segmentation, cross-camera redundant point removal, and foveated volumetric content rendering. We implement a prototype of MetaStream using commodity devices and extensively evaluate its performance. Our results demonstrate that MetaStream achieves low-latency live volumetric video streaming at close to 30 frames per second on WiFi networks. Compared to state-of-the-art systems, MetaStream reduces end-to-end latency by up to 31.7% while improving visual quality by up to 12.5%. 

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) play an important role in today's mobile and edge computing systems for vision-based tasks like object classification and detection. However, state-of-the-art methods on CNN acceleration are trapped in either limited practical latency speed-up on general computing platforms or latency speed-up with severe accuracy loss. In this paper, we propose a spatial-based dynamic CNN acceleration framework, NeuLens, for mobile and edge platforms. Specially, we design a novel dynamic inference mechanism, assemble region-aware convolution (ARAC) supernet, that peels off redundant operations inside CNN models as many as possible based on spatial redundancy and channel slicing. In ARAC supernet, the CNN inference flow is split into multiple independent micro-flows, and the computational cost of each can be autonomously adjusted based on its tiled-input content and application requirements. These micro-flows can be loaded into hardware like GPUs as single models. Consequently, its operation reduction can be well translated into latency speed-up and is compatible with hardware-level accelerations. Moreover, the inference accuracy can be well preserved by identifying critical regions on images and processing them in the original resolution with large micro-flow. Based on our evaluation, NeuLens outperforms baseline methods by up to 58% latency reduction with the same accuracy and by up to 67.9% accuracy improvement under the same latency/memory constraints. 

Mobile headsets should be capable of understanding 3D physical environments to offer a truly immersive experience for augmented/mixed reality (AR/MR). However, their small form-factor and limited computation resources make it extremely challenging to execute in real-time 3D vision algorithms, which are known to be more compute-intensive than their 2D counterparts. In this paper, we propose DeepMix, a mobility-aware, lightweight, and hybrid 3D object detection framework for improving the user experience of AR/MR on mobile headsets. Motivated by our analysis and evaluation of state-of-the-art 3D object detection models, DeepMix intelligently combines edge-assisted 2D object detection and novel, on-device 3D bounding box estimations that leverage depth data captured by headsets. This leads to low end-to-end latency and significantly boosts detection accuracy in mobile scenarios. A unique feature of DeepMix is that it fully exploits the mobility of headsets to fine-tune detection results and boost detection accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, DeepMix is the first 3D object detection that achieves 30 FPS (i.e., an end-to-end latency much lower than the 100 ms stringent requirement of interactive AR/MR). We implement a prototype of DeepMix on Microsoft HoloLens and evaluate its performance via both extensive controlled experiments and a user study with 30+ participants. DeepMix not only improves detection accuracy by 9.1--37.3% but also reduces end-to-end latency by 2.68--9.15×, compared to the baseline that uses existing 3D object detection models.