Bo Yang

Guangtao Wang, Jun Li, Jie Xie et al.

In face detection, low-resolution faces, such as numerous small faces of a human group in a crowded scene, are common in dense face prediction tasks. They usually contain limited visual clues and make small faces less distinguishable from the other small objects, which poses great challenge to accurate face detection. Although deep convolutional neural network has significantly promoted the research on face detection recently, current deep face detectors rarely take into account low-resolution faces and are still vulnerable to the real-world scenarios where massive amount of low-resolution faces exist. Consequently, they usually achieve degraded performance for low-resolution face detection. In order to alleviate this problem, we develop an efficient detector termed EfficientSRFace by introducing a feature-level super-resolution reconstruction network for enhancing the feature representation capability of the model. This module plays an auxiliary role in the training process, and can be removed during the inference without increasing the inference time. Extensive experiments on public benchmarking datasets, such as FDDB and WIDER Face, show that the embedded image super-resolution module can significantly improve the detection accuracy at the cost of a small amount of additional parameters and computational overhead, while helping our model achieve competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-arts methods.

Runxin Han, Bo Yang, Zhiwen Yu et al.

In the field of multi-access edge computing (MEC), efficient computation offloading is crucial for improving resource utilization and reducing latency in dynamically changing environments. This paper introduces a new approach, termed as Multi-Task Domain Adaptation (MTDA), aiming to enhance the ability of computational offloading models to generalize in the presence of domain shifts, i.e., when new data in the target environment significantly differs from the data in the source domain. The proposed MTDA model incorporates a teacher-student architecture that allows continuous adaptation without necessitating access to the source domain data during inference, thereby maintaining privacy and reducing computational overhead. Utilizing a multi-task learning framework that simultaneously manages offloading decisions and resource allocation, the proposed MTDA approach outperforms benchmark methods regarding mean squared error and accuracy, particularly in environments with increasing numbers of users. It is observed by means of computer simulation that the proposed MTDA model maintains high performance across various scenarios, demonstrating its potential for practical deployment in emerging MEC applications.

Bo Yang, Omobayode Fagbohungbe, Xuelin Cao et al.

In this paper, we propose a transfer learning (TL)-enabled edge-CNN framework for 5G industrial edge networks with privacy-preserving characteristic. In particular, the edge server can use the existing image dataset to train the CNN in advance, which is further fine-tuned based on the limited datasets uploaded from the devices. With the aid of TL, the devices that are not participating in the training only need to fine-tune the trained edge-CNN model without training from scratch. Due to the energy budget of the devices and the limited communication bandwidth, a joint energy and latency problem is formulated, which is solved by decomposing the original problem into an uploading decision subproblem and a wireless bandwidth allocation subproblem. Experiments using ImageNet demonstrate that the proposed TL-enabled edge-CNN framework can achieve almost 85% prediction accuracy of the baseline by uploading only about 1% model parameters, for a compression ratio of 32 of the autoencoder.

Bo Yang, Xuelin Cao, Chau Yuen et al.

The empowering unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively used in providing intelligence such as target tracking. In our field experiments, a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) is deployed at the UAV to identify a target (a vehicle) from the captured video frames and enable the UAV to keep tracking. However, this kind of visual target tracking demands a lot of computational resources due to the desired high inference accuracy and stringent delay requirement. This motivates us to consider offloading this type of deep learning (DL) tasks to a mobile edge computing (MEC) server due to limited computational resource and energy budget of the UAV, and further improve the inference accuracy. Specifically, we propose a novel hierarchical DL tasks distribution framework, where the UAV is embedded with lower layers of the pre-trained CNN model, while the MEC server with rich computing resources will handle the higher layers of the CNN model. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the weighted-sum cost including the tracking delay and energy consumption introduced by communication and computing of the UAVs, while taking into account the quality of data (e.g., video frames) input to the DL model and the inference errors. Analytical results are obtained and insights are provided to understand the tradeoff between the weighted-sum cost and inference error rate in the proposed framework. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed offloading framework.

Bo Yang, Xuelin Cao, Joshua Bassey et al.

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) has already shown the potential in enabling mobile devices to bear the computation-intensive applications by offloading some tasks to a nearby access point (AP) integrated with a MEC server (MES). However, due to the varying network conditions and limited computation resources of the MES, the offloading decisions taken by a mobile device and the computational resources allocated by the MES may not be efficiently achieved with the lowest cost. In this paper, we propose a dynamic offloading framework for the MEC network, in which the uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is used to enable multiple devices to upload their tasks via the same frequency band. We formulate the offloading decision problem as a multiclass classification problem and formulate the MES computational resource allocation problem as a regression problem. Then a multi-task learning based feedforward neural network (MTFNN) model is designed to jointly optimize the offloading decision and computational resource allocation. Numerical results illustrate that the proposed MTFNN outperforms the conventional optimization method in terms of inference accuracy and computation complexity.

Bo Yang, Xuelin Cao, Xiangfang Li et al.

This letter proposes an edge learning-based offloading framework for autonomous driving, where the deep learning tasks can be offloaded to the edge server to improve the inference accuracy while meeting the latency constraint. Since the delay and the inference accuracy are incurred by wireless communications and computing, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the inference accuracy subject to the offloading probability, the pre-braking probability, and data quality. Simulations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed offloading framework.