# SC2 Benchmark: Supervised Compression for Split Computing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.08875 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08875/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 99 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01704/) (2016)
- [Joint Autoregressive and Hierarchical Priors for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02736/) (2018)
- [Learned Image Compression with Discretized Gaussian Mixture Likelihoods and Attention Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01568/) (2020)
- [How to train your ViT? Data, Augmentation, and Regularization in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10270/) (2021)
- [Split learning for health: Distributed deep learning without sharing raw patient data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00564/) (2018)
- [Rethinking ImageNet Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08883/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [FrankenSplit: Efficient Neural Feature Compression with Shallow Variational Bottleneck Injection for Mobile Edge Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10681/) (2023)
- [FOOL: Addressing the Downlink Bottleneck in Satellite Computing with Neural Feature Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16677/) (2024)
- [A Multi-task Supervised Compression Model for Split Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01420/) (2025)
- [Semantic Edge Computing and Semantic Communications in 6G Networks: A Unifying Survey and Research Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18199/) (2024)
- [On the Impact of Black-box Deployment Strategies for Edge AI on Latency and Model Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17154/) (2024)
- [Machine Perceptual Quality: Evaluating the Impact of Severe Lossy Compression on Audio and Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07957/) (2024)
- [Resilience of Entropy Model in Distributed Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00942/) (2024)
- [On the Impact of White-box Deployment Strategies for Edge AI on Latency and Model Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00907/) (2024)
- [An Efficient Semantic Segmentation Decoder for In-Car or Distributed Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16747/) (2025)
- [Improving Image Coding for Machines through Optimizing Encoder via Auxiliary Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08267/) (2024)
- [CI-ICM: Channel Importance-driven Learned Image Coding for Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05347/) (2026)
- [Distributed Semantic Segmentation With Improved Rate-Distortion Trade-Off](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28684/) (2026)
- [MANE: A Multi-Path Adaptive Network for Edge Onloading of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14660/) (2026)
- [On Task Scope and Information Retention in Source Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37575/) (2026)
- [JASPER: Special Session on Joint Reliability And Security Assessment of SPlit Computing for Edge Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04396/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the increasing demand for deep learning models on mobile devices, splitting neural network computation between the device and a more powerful edge server has become an attractive solution. However, existing split computing approaches often underperform compared to a naive baseline of remote computation on compressed data. Recent studies propose learning compressed representations that contain more relevant information for supervised downstream tasks, showing improved tradeoffs between compressed data size and supervised performance. However, existing evaluation metrics only provide an incomplete picture of split computing. This study introduces supervised compression for split computing (SC2) and proposes new evaluation criteria: minimizing computation on the mobile device, minimizing transmitted data size, and maximizing model accuracy. We conduct a comprehensive benchmark study using 10 baseline methods, three computer vision tasks, and over 180 trained models, and discuss various aspects of SC2. We also release sc2bench, a Python package for future research on SC2. Our proposed metrics and package will help researchers better understand the tradeoffs of supervised compression in split computing.
