Towards smart and adaptive agents for active sensing on edge devices
This work addresses the problem of enabling smart, adaptive agents for active sensing in resource-constrained environments like surveillance and robotics, representing a novel method rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the limited adaptability of deep learning on edge devices by introducing an agentic system that integrates active inference for on-device perception and planning, achieving real-time operation with a memory footprint as low as 300 MB.
TinyML has made deploying deep learning models on low-power edge devices feasible, creating new opportunities for real-time perception in constrained environments. However, the adaptability of such deep learning methods remains limited to data drift adaptation, lacking broader capabilities that account for the environment's underlying dynamics and inherent uncertainty. Deep learning's scaling laws, which counterbalance this limitation by massively up-scaling data and model size, cannot be applied when deploying on the Edge, where deep learning limitations are further amplified as models are scaled down for deployment on resource-constrained devices. This paper presents an innovative agentic system capable of performing on-device perception and planning, enabling active sensing on the edge. By incorporating active inference into our solution, our approach extends beyond deep learning capabilities, allowing the system to plan in dynamic environments while operating in real-time with a compact memory footprint of as little as 300 MB. We showcase our proposed system by creating and deploying a saccade agent connected to an IoT camera with pan and tilt capabilities on an NVIDIA Jetson embedded device. The saccade agent controls the camera's field of view following optimal policies derived from the active inference principles, simulating human-like saccadic motion for surveillance and robotics applications.