Alireza Furutanpey

Alireza Furutanpey, Philipp Raith, Schahram Dustdar

The rise of mobile AI accelerators allows latency-sensitive applications to execute lightweight Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on the client side. However, critical applications require powerful models that edge devices cannot host and must therefore offload requests, where the high-dimensional data will compete for limited bandwidth. This work proposes shifting away from focusing on executing shallow layers of partitioned DNNs. Instead, it advocates concentrating the local resources on variational compression optimized for machine interpretability. We introduce a novel framework for resource-conscious compression models and extensively evaluate our method in an environment reflecting the asymmetric resource distribution between edge devices and servers. Our method achieves 60% lower bitrate than a state-of-the-art SC method without decreasing accuracy and is up to 16x faster than offloading with existing codec standards.

Alireza Furutanpey, Qiyang Zhang, Philipp Raith et al.

Nanosatellite constellations equipped with sensors capturing large geographic regions provide unprecedented opportunities for Earth observation. As constellation sizes increase, network contention poses a downlink bottleneck. Orbital Edge Computing (OEC) leverages limited onboard compute resources to reduce transfer costs by processing the raw captures at the source. However, current solutions have limited practicability due to reliance on crude filtering methods or over-prioritizing particular downstream tasks. This work presents FOOL, an OEC-native and task-agnostic feature compression method that preserves prediction performance. FOOL partitions high-resolution satellite imagery to maximize throughput. Further, it embeds context and leverages inter-tile dependencies to lower transfer costs with negligible overhead. While FOOL is a feature compressor, it can recover images with competitive scores on quality measures at lower bitrates. We extensively evaluate transfer cost reduction by including the peculiarity of intermittently available network connections in low earth orbit. Lastly, we test the feasibility of our system for standardized nanosatellite form factors. We demonstrate that FOOL permits downlinking over 100x the data volume without relying on prior information on the downstream tasks.

Alireza Furutanpey, Pantelis A. Frangoudis, Patrik Szabo et al.

This paper investigates the adversarial robustness of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) using Information Bottleneck (IB) objectives for task-oriented communication systems. We empirically demonstrate that while IB-based approaches provide baseline resilience against attacks targeting downstream tasks, the reliance on generative models for task-oriented communication introduces new vulnerabilities. Through extensive experiments on several datasets, we analyze how bottleneck depth and task complexity influence adversarial robustness. Our key findings show that Shallow Variational Bottleneck Injection (SVBI) provides less adversarial robustness compared to Deep Variational Information Bottleneck (DVIB) approaches, with the gap widening for more complex tasks. Additionally, we reveal that IB-based objectives exhibit stronger robustness against attacks focusing on salient pixels with high intensity compared to those perturbing many pixels with lower intensity. Lastly, we demonstrate that task-oriented communication systems that rely on generative models to extract and recover salient information have an increased attack surface. The results highlight important security considerations for next-generation communication systems that leverage neural networks for goal-oriented compression.

Alireza Furutanpey, Carmen Walser, Philipp Raith et al.

This work presents a comprehensive evaluation of neural network graph compilers across heterogeneous hardware platforms, addressing the critical gap between theoretical optimization techniques and practical deployment scenarios. We demonstrate how vendor-specific optimizations can invalidate relative performance comparisons between architectural archetypes, with performance advantages sometimes completely reversing after compilation. Our systematic analysis reveals that graph compilers exhibit performance patterns highly dependent on both neural architecture and batch sizes. Through fine-grained block-level experimentation, we establish that vendor-specific compilers can leverage repeated patterns in simple architectures, yielding disproportionate throughput gains as model depth increases. We introduce novel metrics to quantify a compiler's ability to mitigate performance friction as batch size increases. Our methodology bridges the gap between academic research and practical deployment by incorporating compiler effects throughout the research process, providing actionable insights for practitioners navigating complex optimization landscapes across heterogeneous hardware environments.

Ivan Čilić, Anna Lackinger, Pantelis Frangoudis et al.

Deploying a Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) pipeline across the computing continuum (CC) requires careful organization of participants into a hierarchical structure with intermediate aggregation nodes between FL clients and the global FL server. This is challenging to achieve due to (i) cost constraints, (ii) varying data distributions, and (iii) the volatile operating environment of the CC. In response to these challenges, we present a framework for the adaptive orchestration of HFL pipelines, designed to be reactive to client churn and infrastructure-level events, while balancing communication cost and ML model accuracy. Our mechanisms identify and react to events that cause HFL reconfiguration actions at runtime, building on multi-level monitoring information (model accuracy, resource availability, resource cost). Moreover, our framework introduces a generic methodology for estimating reconfiguration costs to continuously re-evaluate the quality of adaptation actions, while being extensible to optimize for various HFL performance criteria. By extending the Kubernetes ecosystem, our framework demonstrates the ability to react promptly and effectively to changes in the operating environment, making the best of the available communication cost budget and effectively balancing costs and ML performance at runtime.

Boris Sedlak, Alireza Furutanpey, Zihang Wang et al.

Edge computing breaks with traditional autoscaling due to strict resource constraints, thus, motivating more flexible scaling behaviors using multiple elasticity dimensions. This work introduces an agent-based autoscaling framework that dynamically adjusts both hardware resources and internal service configurations to maximize requirements fulfillment in constrained environments. We compare four types of scaling agents: Active Inference, Deep Q Network, Analysis of Structural Knowledge, and Deep Active Inference, using two real-world processing services running in parallel: YOLOv8 for visual recognition and OpenCV for QR code detection. Results show all agents achieve acceptable SLO performance with varying convergence patterns. While the Deep Q Network benefits from pre-training, the structural analysis converges quickly, and the deep active inference agent combines theoretical foundations with practical scalability advantages. Our findings provide evidence for the viability of multi-dimensional agent-based autoscaling for edge environments and encourage future work in this research direction.

Alireza Furutanpey, Johanna Barzen, Marvin Bechtold et al.

Quantum processing units (QPUs) are currently exclusively available from cloud vendors. However, with recent advancements, hosting QPUs is soon possible everywhere. Existing work has yet to draw from research in edge computing to explore systems exploiting mobile QPUs, or how hybrid applications can benefit from distributed heterogeneous resources. Hence, this work presents an architecture for Quantum Computing in the edge-cloud continuum. We discuss the necessity, challenges, and solution approaches for extending existing work on classical edge computing to integrate QPUs. We describe how warm-starting allows defining workflows that exploit the hierarchical resources spread across the continuum. Then, we introduce a distributed inference engine with hybrid classical-quantum neural networks (QNNs) to aid system designers in accommodating applications with complex requirements that incur the highest degree of heterogeneity. We propose solutions focusing on classical layer partitioning and quantum circuit cutting to demonstrate the potential of utilizing classical and quantum computation across the continuum. To evaluate the importance and feasibility of our vision, we provide a proof of concept that exemplifies how extending a classical partition method to integrate quantum circuits can improve the solution quality. Specifically, we implement a split neural network with optional hybrid QNN predictors. Our results show that extending classical methods with QNNs is viable and promising for future work.