Auto-tuning Neural Network Quantization Framework for Collaborative Inference Between the Cloud and Edge

Abstract: Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely applied in mobile intelligent applications. The inference for the DNNs is usually performed in the cloud. However, it leads to a large overhead of transmitting data via wireless network. In this paper, we demonstrate the advantages of the cloud-edge collaborative inference with quantization. By analyzing the characteristics of layers in DNNs, an auto-tuning neural network quantization framework for collaborative inference is proposed. We study the effectiveness of mixed-precision collaborative inference of state-of-the-art DNNs by using ImageNet dataset. The experimental results show that our framework can generate reasonable network partitions and reduce the storage on mobile devices with trivial loss of accuracy.