Recently, the applications of deep neural network (DNN) have been very prominent in many fields such as computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) due to its superior feature extraction performance. However, the high-dimension parameter model and large-scale mathematical calculation restrict the execution efficiency, especially for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Different from the previous cloud/edge-only pattern that brings huge pressure for uplink communication and device-only fashion that undertakes unaffordable calculation strength, we highlight the collaborative computation between the device and edge for DNN models, which can achieve a good balance between the communication load and execution accuracy. Specifically, a systematic on-demand co-inference framework is proposed to exploit the multi-branch structure, in which the pre-trained Alexnet is right-sized through \emph{early-exit} and partitioned at an intermediate DNN layer. The integer quantization is enforced to further compress transmission bits. As a result, we establish a new Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) optimizer-Soft Actor Critic for discrete (SAC-d), which generates the \emph{exit point}, \emph{partition point}, and \emph{compressing bits} by soft policy iterations. Based on the latency and accuracy aware reward design, such an optimizer can well adapt to the complex environment like dynamic wireless channel and arbitrary CPU processing, and is capable of supporting the 5G URLLC. Real-world experiment on Raspberry Pi 4 and PC shows the outperformance of the proposed solution.

提出了一种基于 Deep Neural Network（DNN）模型的 IoT 设备与边缘协同计算框架，通过多分支结构、智能早停、硬件中间分割与整数量化等技术实现了优秀的通信负载和执行精度平衡，结合基于 Soft Actor Critic（SAC-d）的深度强化学习优化算法实现了动态无线通道和任意 CPU 处理下的适应性支持，并在树莓派 4 和 PC 上进行了实验。

基于软 Actor-Critic 的自适应设备-边缘联合推理框架