EdgeRL: Reinforcement Learning-driven Deep Learning Model Inference Optimization at Edge

Balancing mutually diverging performance metrics, such as, processing latency, outcome accuracy, and end device energy consumption is a challenging undertaking for deep learning model inference in ad-hoc edge environments. In this paper, we propose EdgeRL framework that seeks to strike such balance by using an Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C) Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach that can choose optimal run-time DNN inference parameters and aligns the performance metrics based on the application requirements. Using real world deep learning model and a hardware testbed, we evaluate the benefits of EdgeRL framework in terms of end device energy savings, inference accuracy improvement, and end-to-end inference latency reduction.

UniDoorManip: Learning Universal Door Manipulation Policy Over Large-scale and Diverse Door Manipulation Environments

Learning a universal manipulation policy encompassing doors with diverse categories, geometries and mechanisms, is crucial for future embodied agents to effectively work in complex and broad real-world scenarios. Due to the limited datasets and unrealistic simulation environments, previous works fail to achieve good performance across various doors. In this work, we build a novel door manipulation environment reflecting different realistic door manipulation mechanisms, and further equip this environment with a large-scale door dataset covering 6 door categories with hundreds of door bodies and handles, making up thousands of different door instances. Additionally, to better emulate real-world scenarios, we introduce a mobile robot as the agent and use the partial and occluded point cloud as the observation, which are not considered in previous works while possessing significance for real-world implementations. To learn a universal policy over diverse doors, we propose a novel framework disentangling the whole manipulation process into three stages, and integrating them by training in the reversed order of inference. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our designs and demonstrate our framework's strong performance. Code, data and videos are avaible on https://unidoormanip.github.io/.

End-to-End Latency Optimization of Multi-view 3D Reconstruction for Disaster Response

In order to plan rapid response during disasters, first responder agencies often adopt `bring your own device' (BYOD) model with inexpensive mobile edge devices (e.g., drones, robots, tablets) for complex video analytics applications, e.g., 3D reconstruction of a disaster scene. Unlike simpler video applications, widely used Multi-view Stereo (MVS) based 3D reconstruction applications (e.g., openMVG/openMVS) are exceedingly time consuming, especially when run on such computationally constrained mobile edge devices. Additionally, reducing the reconstruction latency of such inherently sequential algorithms is challenging as unintelligent, application-agnostic strategies can drastically degrade the reconstruction (i.e., application outcome) quality making them useless. In this paper, we aim to design a latency optimized MVS algorithm pipeline, with the objective to best balance the end-to-end latency and reconstruction quality by running the pipeline on a collaborative mobile edge environment. The overall optimization approach is two-pronged where: (a) application optimizations introduce data-level parallelism by splitting the pipeline into high frequency and low frequency reconstruction components and (b) system optimizations incorporate task-level parallelism to the pipelines by running them opportunistically on available resources with online quality control in order to balance both latency and quality. Our evaluation on a hardware testbed using publicly available datasets shows upto ~54% reduction in latency with negligible loss (~4-7%) in reconstruction quality.

Integer Quantization for Deep Learning Inference: Principles and Empirical Evaluation

Quantization techniques can reduce the size of Deep Neural Networks and improve inference latency and throughput by taking advantage of high throughput integer instructions. In this paper we review the mathematical aspects of quantization parameters and evaluate their choices on a wide range of neural network models for different application domains, including vision, speech, and language. We focus on quantization techniques that are amenable to acceleration by processors with high-throughput integer math pipelines. We also present a workflow for 8-bit quantization that is able to maintain accuracy within 1% of the floating-point baseline on all networks studied, including models that are more difficult to quantize, such as MobileNets and BERT-large.