Auto-Split: A General Framework of Collaborative Edge-Cloud AI
This addresses the problem of efficient AI deployment for industry-scale edge-cloud systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing collaborative AI concepts.
The paper tackles the challenge of deploying large machine learning models efficiently across edge and cloud environments, presenting Auto-Split, a patented prototype from Huawei Cloud that enables DNN splitting to maintain high accuracy and low latency in industry applications.
In many industry scale applications, large and resource consuming machine learning models reside in powerful cloud servers. At the same time, large amounts of input data are collected at the edge of cloud. The inference results are also communicated to users or passed to downstream tasks at the edge. The edge often consists of a large number of low-power devices. It is a big challenge to design industry products to support sophisticated deep model deployment and conduct model inference in an efficient manner so that the model accuracy remains high and the end-to-end latency is kept low. This paper describes the techniques and engineering practice behind Auto-Split, an edge-cloud collaborative prototype of Huawei Cloud. This patented technology is already validated on selected applications, is on its way for broader systematic edge-cloud application integration, and is being made available for public use as an automated pipeline service for end-to-end cloud-edge collaborative intelligence deployment. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing industry product that provides the capability of Deep Neural Network (DNN) splitting.