Context-Aware Compilation of DNN Training Pipelines across Edge and Cloud

Abstract

Empowered by machine learning, edge devices including smartphones, wearable, and IoT devices have become growingly intelligent, raising conflicts with the limited resource. On-device model personalization is particularly hard as training models on edge devices is highly resource-intensive. In this work, we propose a novel training pipeline across the edge and the cloud, by taking advantage of the powerful cloud while keeping data local at the edge. Highlights of the design incorporate the parallel execution enabled by our feature replay, reduced communication cost by our error-feedback feature compression, as well as the context-aware deployment decision engine. Working as an integrated system, the proposed pipeline training framework not only significantly speeds up training, but also incurs little accuracy loss or additional memory/energy overhead. We test our system in a variety of settings including WiFi, 5G, household IoT, and on different training tasks such as image/text classification, image generation, to demonstrate its advantage over the state-of-the-art. Experimental results show that our system not only adapts well to, but also draws on the varying contexts, delivering a practical and efficient solution to edge-cloud model training.