# Distributed Semantic Segmentation with Efficient Joint Source and Task Decoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11224/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Video Enhancement with Task-Oriented Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09078/) (2017)
- [RepVGG: Making VGG-style ConvNets Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03697/) (2021)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [InternImage: Exploring Large-Scale Vision Foundation Models with Deformable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05778/) (2022)
- [Lossy Image Compression with Compressive Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00395/) (2017)
- [CompressAI: a PyTorch library and evaluation platform for end-to-end compression research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03029/) (2020)
- [SegNeXt: Rethinking Convolutional Attention Design for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08575/) (2022)
- [Advances in Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05597/) (2017)
- [OverFeat: Integrated Recognition, Localization and Detection using Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6229/) (2013)
- [Attention to Scale: Scale-aware Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03339/) (2015)
- [FastViT: A Fast Hybrid Vision Transformer using Structural Reparameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14189/) (2023)
- [Hypercolumns for Object Segmentation and Fine-grained Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5752/) (2014)
- [MobileOne: An Improved One millisecond Mobile Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04040/) (2022)
- [Diverse Branch Block: Building a Convolution as an Inception-like Unit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13425/) (2021)
- [JointDNN: An Efficient Training and Inference Engine for Intelligent Mobile Cloud Computing Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08618/) (2018)
- [Variable-Rate Deep Image Compression through Spatially-Adaptive Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09551/) (2021)
- [Towards Image Understanding from Deep Compression without Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06131/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Diff-ICMH: Harmonizing Machine and Human Vision in Image Compression with Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22549/) (2025)
- [An Efficient Semantic Segmentation Decoder for In-Car or Distributed Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16747/) (2025)
- [Efficient Multi-View 3D Object Detection by Dynamic Token Selection and Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13586/) (2026)
- [Distributed Semantic Segmentation With Improved Rate-Distortion Trade-Off](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28684/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Distributed computing in the context of deep neural networks (DNNs) implies the execution of one part of the network on edge devices and the other part typically on a large-scale cloud platform. Conventional methods propose to employ a serial concatenation of a learned image and source encoder, the latter projecting the image encoder output (bottleneck features) into a quantized representation for bitrate-efficient transmission. In the cloud, a respective source decoder reprojects the quantized representation to the original feature representation, serving as an input for the downstream task decoder performing, e.g., semantic segmentation. In this work, we propose joint source and task decoding, as it allows for a smaller network size in the cloud. This further enables the scalability of such services in large numbers without requiring extensive computational load on the cloud per channel. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by achieving a distributed semantic segmentation SOTA over a wide range of bitrates on the mean intersection over union metric, while using only 9.8 % ... 11.59 % of cloud DNN parameters used in the previous SOTA on the COCO and Cityscapes datasets.