# Efficient Post-Training Augmentation for Adaptive Inference in Heterogeneous and Distributed IoT Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07957 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07957/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Speech Commands: A Dataset for Limited-Vocabulary Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03209/) (2018)
- [BranchyNet: Fast Inference via Early Exiting from Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01686/) (2017)
- [Hello Edge: Keyword Spotting on Microcontrollers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07128/) (2017)
- [Changing Model Behavior at Test-Time Using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07780/) (2017)
- [HADAS: Hardware-Aware Dynamic Neural Architecture Search for Edge Performance Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03354/) (2022)
- [Map-and-Conquer: Energy-Efficient Mapping of Dynamic Neural Nets onto Heterogeneous MPSoCs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12926/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Early Exit Neural Networks (EENNs) present a solution to enhance the efficiency of neural network deployments. However, creating EENNs is challenging and requires specialized domain knowledge, due to the large amount of additional design choices. To address this issue, we propose an automated augmentation flow that focuses on converting an existing model into an EENN. It performs all required design decisions for the deployment to heterogeneous or distributed hardware targets: Our framework constructs the EENN architecture, maps its subgraphs to the hardware targets, and configures its decision mechanism. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first framework that is able to perform all of these steps. We evaluated our approach on a collection of Internet-of-Things and standard image classification use cases. For a speech command detection task, our solution was able to reduce the mean operations per inference by 59.67%. For an ECG classification task, it was able to terminate all samples early, reducing the mean inference energy by 74.9% and computations by 78.3%. On CIFAR-10, our solution was able to achieve up to a 58.75% reduction in computations. The search on a ResNet-152 base model for CIFAR-10 took less than nine hours on a laptop CPU. Our proposed approach enables the creation of EENN optimized for IoT environments and can reduce the inference cost of Deep Learning applications on embedded and fog platforms, while also significantly reducing the search cost - making it more accessible for scientists and engineers in industry and research. The low search cost improves the accessibility of EENNs, with the potential to improve the efficiency of neural networks in a wide range of practical applications.