Shared Mobile-Cloud Inference for Collaborative Intelligence
This addresses the need for efficient and private AI inference on mobile devices, offering an incremental improvement over existing cloud-only or mobile-only approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of high latency, energy consumption, and privacy risks in cloud-only AI inference for mobile devices by proposing shared mobile-cloud inference, where partial inference on mobile reduces input data to a compact feature tensor for transmission, resulting in improvements in latency, energy, and bandwidth usage.
As AI applications for mobile devices become more prevalent, there is an increasing need for faster execution and lower energy consumption for neural model inference. Historically, the models run on mobile devices have been smaller and simpler in comparison to large state-of-the-art research models, which can only run on the cloud. However, cloud-only inference has drawbacks such as increased network bandwidth consumption and higher latency. In addition, cloud-only inference requires the input data (images, audio) to be fully transferred to the cloud, creating concerns about potential privacy breaches. We demonstrate an alternative approach: shared mobile-cloud inference. Partial inference is performed on the mobile in order to reduce the dimensionality of the input data and arrive at a compact feature tensor, which is a latent space representation of the input signal. The feature tensor is then transmitted to the server for further inference. This strategy can improve inference latency, energy consumption, and network bandwidth usage, as well as provide privacy protection, because the original signal never leaves the mobile. Further performance gain can be achieved by compressing the feature tensor before its transmission.