The recent breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI), especially deep neural networks (DNNs), has affected every branch of science and technology. Particularly, edge AI has been envisioned as a major application scenario to provide DNN-based services at edge devices. This article presents effective methods for edge inference at resource-constrained devices. It focuses on device-edge co-inference, assisted by an edge computing server, and investigates a critical trade-off among the computation cost of the on-device model and the communication cost of forwarding the intermediate feature to the edge server. A three-step framework is proposed for the effective inference: (1) model split point selection to determine the on-device model, (2) communication-aware model compression to reduce the on-device computation and the resulting communication overhead simultaneously, and (3) task-oriented encoding of the intermediate feature to further reduce the communication overhead. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves a better trade-off and significantly reduces the inference latency than baseline methods.

本文提出了一种有效的边缘计算推理方法，并探讨了在设备模型的计算成本和中间特征的通信成本之间进行的关键权衡。通过模型拆分点选择、通信感知模型压缩和任务导向的中间特征编码，提出了一个三步框架来有效地进行推理，实验结果表明，与基准方法相比，我们的提出的框架具有更好的权衡，可以显著减少推理延迟。

资源受限边缘推理中的通信计算权衡