# Range Asymmetric Numeral Systems-Based Lightweight Intermediate Feature Compression for Split Computing of Deep Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11664 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11664/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [Deep Neural Networks and Tabular Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01889/) (2021)
- [OmniQuant: Omnidirectionally Calibrated Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13137/) (2023)
- [Atom: Low-bit Quantization for Efficient and Accurate LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19102/) (2023)
- [A Review on Edge Large Language Models: Design, Execution, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11845/) (2024)
- [Improving Statistical Fidelity for Neural Image Compression with Implicit Local Likelihood Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11189/) (2023)
- [Supervised Compression for Resource-Constrained Edge Computing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11898/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Split Computing for Efficient Deep Edge Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11269/) (2022)
- [Communication-Efficient Split Learning via Adaptive Feature-Wise Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10805/) (2023)
- [Lightweight compression of neural network feature tensors for collaborative intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06002/) (2021)
- [SplitEE: Early Exit in Deep Neural Networks with Split Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09195/) (2023)
- [Efficient Feature Compression for Edge-Cloud Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09897/) (2022)
- [Lambda-Split: A Privacy-Preserving Split Computing Framework for Cloud-Powered Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14651/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Split computing distributes deep neural network inference between resource-constrained edge devices and cloud servers but faces significant communication bottlenecks when transmitting intermediate features. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel lightweight compression framework that leverages Range Asymmetric Numeral Systems (rANS) encoding with asymmetric integer quantization and sparse tensor representation to reduce transmission overhead dramatically. Specifically, our approach combines asymmetric integer quantization with a sparse representation technique, eliminating the need for complex probability modeling or network modifications. The key contributions include: (1) a distribution-agnostic compression pipeline that exploits inherent tensor sparsity to achieve bandwidth reduction with minimal computational overhead; (2) an approximate theoretical model that optimizes tensor reshaping dimensions to maximize compression efficiency; and (3) a GPU-accelerated implementation with sub-millisecond encoding/decoding latency. Extensive evaluations across diverse neural architectures (ResNet, VGG16, MobileNetV2, SwinT, DenseNet121, EfficientNetB0) demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently maintains near-baseline accuracy across CIFAR100 and ImageNet benchmarks. Moreover, we validated the framework's effectiveness on advanced natural language processing tasks by employing Llama2 7B and 13B on standard benchmarks such as MMLU, HellaSwag, ARC, PIQA, Winogrande, BoolQ, and OpenBookQA, demonstrating its broad applicability beyond computer vision. Furthermore, this method addresses a fundamental bottleneck in deploying sophisticated artificial intelligence systems in bandwidth-constrained environments without compromising model performance.