Medical knowledge extraction methods based on edge computing deploy deep learning models on edge devices to achieve localized entity and relation extraction. This approach avoids transferring substantial sensitive data to cloud data centers, effectively safeguarding the privacy of healthcare services. However, existing relation extraction methods mainly employ a sequential pipeline approach, which classifies relations between determined entities after entity recognition. This mode faces challenges such as error propagation between tasks, insufficient consideration of dependencies between the two subtasks, and the neglect of interrelations between different relations within a sentence. To address these challenges, a joint extraction model with parameter sharing in edge computing is proposed, named CoEx-Bert. This model leverages shared parameterization between two models to jointly extract entities and relations. Specifically, CoEx-Bert employs two models, each separately sharing hidden layer parameters, and combines these two loss functions for joint backpropagation to optimize the model parameters. Additionally, it effectively resolves the issue of entity overlapping when extracting knowledge from unstructured Uyghur medical texts by considering contextual relations. Finally, this model is deployed on edge devices for real-time extraction and inference of Uyghur medical knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate that CoEx-Bert outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving accuracy, recall, and F1 scores of 90.65\%, 92.45\%, and 91.54\%, respectively, in the Uyghur traditional medical literature dataset. These improvements represent a 6.45\% increase in accuracy, a 9.45\% increase in recall, and a 7.95\% increase in F1 score compared to the baseline.
In the rapidly advancing information era, various human behaviors are being precisely recorded in the form of data, including identity information, criminal records, and communication data. Law enforcement agencies can effectively maintain social security and precisely combat criminal activities by analyzing the aforementioned data. In comparison to traditional data analysis methods, deep learning models, relying on the robust computational power in cloud centers, exhibit higher accuracy in extracting data features and inferring data. However, within the architecture of cloud centers, the transmission of data from end devices introduces significant latency, hindering real-time inference of data. Furthermore, low-latency edge computing architectures face limitations in direct deployment due to relatively weak computing and storage capacities of nodes. To address these challenges, a lightweight distributed knowledge graph completion architecture is proposed. Firstly, we introduce a lightweight distributed knowledge graph completion architecture that utilizes knowledge graph embedding for data analysis. Subsequently, to filter out substandard data, a personnel data quality assessment method named PDQA is proposed. Lastly, we present a model pruning algorithm that significantly reduces the model size while maximizing performance, enabling lightweight deployment. In experiments, we compare the effects of 11 advanced models on completing the knowledge graph of public security personnel information. The results indicate that the RotatE model outperforms other models significantly in knowledge graph completion, with the pruned model size reduced by 70\%, and hits@10 reaching 86.97\%.}
We introduce a rapid and precise analytical approach for analyzing cerebral blood flow (CBF) using Diffuse Correlation Spectroscopy (DCS) with the application of the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM). Our evaluation of ELM and existing algorithms involves a comprehensive set of metrics. We assess these algorithms using synthetic datasets for both semi-infinite and multi-layer models. The results demonstrate that ELM consistently achieves higher fidelity across various noise levels and optical parameters, showcasing robust generalization ability and outperforming iterative fitting algorithms. Through a comparison with a computationally efficient neural network, ELM attains comparable accuracy with reduced training and inference times. Notably, the absence of a back-propagation process in ELM during training results in significantly faster training speeds compared to existing neural network approaches. This proposed strategy holds promise for edge computing applications with online training capabilities.
Detecting behind-the-meter (BTM) equipment and major appliances at the residential level and tracking their changes in real time is important for aggregators and traditional electricity utilities. In our previous work, we developed a systematic solution called IRMAC to identify residential users' BTM equipment and applications from their imported energy data. As a part of IRMAC, a Similarity Profile (SP) was proposed for dimensionality reduction and extracting self-join similarity from the end users' daily electricity usage data. The proposed SP calculation, however, was computationally expensive and required a significant amount of memory at the user's end. To realise the benefits of edge computing, in this paper, we propose and assess three computationally-efficient updating solutions, namely additive, fixed memory, and codebook-based updating methods. Extensive simulation studies are carried out using real PV users' data to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods in identifying PV users, tracking changes in real time, and examining memory usage. We found that the Codebook-based solution reduces more than 30\% of the required memory without compromising the performance of extracting users' features. When the end users' data storage and computation speed are concerned, the fixed-memory method outperforms the others. In terms of tracking the changes, different variations of the fixed-memory method show various inertia levels, making them suitable for different applications.
We present WidthFormer, a novel transformer-based module to compute Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representations from multi-view cameras for real-time autonomous-driving applications. WidthFormer is computationally efficient, robust and does not require any special engineering effort to deploy. We first introduce a novel 3D positional encoding mechanism capable of accurately encapsulating 3D geometric information, which enables our model to compute high-quality BEV representations with only a single transformer decoder layer. This mechanism is also beneficial for existing sparse 3D object detectors. Inspired by the recently proposed works, we further improve our model's efficiency by vertically compressing the image features when serving as attention keys and values, and then we develop two modules to compensate for potential information loss due to feature compression. Experimental evaluation on the widely-used nuScenes 3D object detection benchmark demonstrates that our method outperforms previous approaches across different 3D detection architectures. More importantly, our model is highly efficient. For example, when using $256\times 704$ input images, it achieves 1.5 ms and 2.8 ms latency on NVIDIA 3090 GPU and Horizon Journey-5 computation solutions. Furthermore, WidthFormer also exhibits strong robustness to different degrees of camera perturbations. Our study offers valuable insights into the deployment of BEV transformation methods in real-world, complex road environments. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenhongyiYang/WidthFormer .
Transformer has been adopted to image recognition tasks and shown to outperform CNNs and RNNs while it suffers from high training cost and computational complexity. To address these issues, a hybrid approach has become a recent research trend, which replaces a part of ResNet with an MHSA (Multi-Head Self-Attention). In this paper, we propose a lightweight hybrid model which uses Neural ODE (Ordinary Differential Equation) as a backbone instead of ResNet so that we can increase the number of iterations of building blocks while reusing the same parameters, mitigating the increase in parameter size per iteration. The proposed model is deployed on a modest-sized FPGA device for edge computing. The model is further quantized by QAT (Quantization Aware Training) scheme to reduce FPGA resource utilization while suppressing the accuracy loss. The quantized model achieves 79.68% top-1 accuracy for STL10 dataset that contains 96$\times$96 pixel images. The weights of the feature extraction network are stored on-chip to minimize the memory transfer overhead, allowing faster inference. By eliminating the overhead of memory transfers, inference can be executed seamlessly, leading to accelerated inference. The proposed FPGA implementation accelerates the backbone and MHSA parts by 34.01$\times$, and achieves an overall 9.85$\times$ speedup when taking into account the software pre- and post-processing. The FPGA acceleration leads to 7.10$\times$ better energy efficiency compared to the ARM Cortex-A53 CPU. The proposed lightweight Transformer model is demonstrated on Xilinx ZCU104 board for the image recognition of 96$\times$96 pixel images in this paper and can be applied to different image sizes by modifying the pre-processing layer.
Smart Digital twins (SDTs) are being increasingly used to virtually replicate and predict the behaviors of complex physical systems through continual data assimilation enabling the optimization of the performance of these systems by controlling the actions of systems. Recently, deep learning (DL) models have significantly enhanced the capabilities of SDTs, particularly for tasks such as predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and optimization. In many domains, including medicine, engineering, and education, SDTs use image data (image-based SDTs) to observe and learn system behaviors and control their behaviors. This paper focuses on various approaches and associated challenges in developing image-based SDTs by continually assimilating image data from physical systems. The paper also discusses the challenges involved in designing and implementing DL models for SDTs, including data acquisition, processing, and interpretation. In addition, insights into the future directions and opportunities for developing new image-based DL approaches to develop robust SDTs are provided. This includes the potential for using generative models for data augmentation, developing multi-modal DL models, and exploring the integration of DL with other technologies, including 5G, edge computing, and IoT. In this paper, we describe the image-based SDTs, which enable broader adoption of the digital twin DT paradigms across a broad spectrum of areas and the development of new methods to improve the abilities of SDTs in replicating, predicting, and optimizing the behavior of complex systems.
In recent years, edge computing has served as a paradigm that enables many future technologies like AI, Robotics, IoT, and high-speed wireless sensor networks (like 5G) by connecting cloud computing facilities and services to the end users. Especially in medical and healthcare applications, it provides remote patient monitoring and increases voluminous multimedia. From the robotics angle, robot-assisted therapy (RAT) is an active-assistive robotic technology in rehabilitation robotics, attracting researchers to study and benefit people with disability like autism spectrum disorder (ASD) children. However, the main challenge of RAT is that the model capable of detecting the affective states of ASD people exists and can recall individual preferences. Moreover, involving expert diagnosis and recommendations to guide robots in updating the therapy approach to adapt to different statuses and scenarios is a crucial part of the ASD therapy process. This paper proposes the architecture of edge cognitive computing by combining human experts and assisted robots collaborating in the same framework to achieve a seamless remote diagnosis, round-the-clock symptom monitoring, emergency warning, therapy alteration, and advanced assistance.
This paper presents a novel approach to network pruning, targeting block pruning in deep neural networks for edge computing environments. Our method diverges from traditional techniques that utilize proxy metrics, instead employing a direct block removal strategy to assess the impact on classification accuracy. This hands-on approach allows for an accurate evaluation of each block's importance. We conducted extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets using ResNet architectures. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of our method, particularly on large-scale datasets like ImageNet with ResNet50, where it excelled in reducing model size while retaining high accuracy, even when pruning a significant portion of the network. The findings underscore our method's capability in maintaining an optimal balance between model size and performance, especially in resource-constrained edge computing scenarios.
Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) can be implemented together with Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) over commodity platforms to offer low-cost deployment and bring the services closer to end-users. In this paper, a joint O-RAN/MEC orchestration using a Bayesian deep reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework is proposed that jointly controls the O-RAN functional splits, the allocated resources and hosting locations of the O-RAN/MEC services across geo-distributed platforms, and the routing for each O-RAN/MEC data flow. The goal is to minimize the long-term overall network operation cost and maximize the MEC performance criterion while adapting possibly time-varying O-RAN/MEC demands and resource availability. This orchestration problem is formulated as Markov decision process (MDP). However, the system consists of multiple BSs that share the same resources and serve heterogeneous demands, where their parameters have non-trivial relations. Consequently, finding the exact model of the underlying system is impractical, and the formulated MDP renders in a large state space with multi-dimensional discrete action. To address such modeling and dimensionality issues, a novel model-free RL agent is proposed for our solution framework. The agent is built from Double Deep Q-network (DDQN) that tackles the large state space and is then incorporated with action branching, an action decomposition method that effectively addresses the multi-dimensional discrete action with linear increase complexity. Further, an efficient exploration-exploitation strategy under a Bayesian framework using Thomson sampling is proposed to improve the learning performance and expedite its convergence. Trace-driven simulations are performed using an O-RAN-compliant model. The results show that our approach is data-efficient (i.e., converges faster) and increases the returned reward by 32\% than its non-Bayesian version.
Foundation models have shown great success in natural language processing, computer vision, and multimodal tasks. FMs have a large number of model parameters, thus requiring a substantial amount of data to help optimize the model during the training. Federated learning has revolutionized machine learning by enabling collaborative learning from decentralized data while still preserving the data privacy of clients. Despite the great benefits foundation models can have empowered by federated learning, they face severe computation, communication, and statistical challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage federated learning algorithm called FedMS. A global expert is trained in the first stage and a local expert is trained in the second stage to provide better personalization. We construct a Mixture of Foundation Models (MoFM) with these two experts and design a gate neural network with an inserted gate adapter that joins the aggregation every communication round in the second stage. To further adapt to edge computing scenarios with limited computational resources, we design a novel Sparsely Activated LoRA (SAL) algorithm that freezes the pre-trained foundation model parameters inserts low-rank adaptation matrices into transformer blocks and activates them progressively during the training. We employ extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of FedMS, results show that FedMS outperforms other SOTA baselines by up to 55.25% in default settings.
While it is important to make implantable brain-machine interfaces (iBMI) wireless to increase patient comfort and safety, the trend of increased channel count in recent neural probes poses a challenge due to the concomitant increase in the data rate. Extracting information from raw data at the source by using edge computing is a promising solution to this problem, with integrated intention decoders providing the best compression ratio. Recent benchmarking efforts have shown recurrent neural networks to be the best solution. Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) emerge as a promising solution for resource efficient neural decoding while Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks achieve the best accuracy. In this work, we show that combining traditional signal processing techniques, namely signal filtering, with SNNs improve their decoding performance significantly for regression tasks, closing the gap with LSTMs, at little added cost. Results with different filters are shown with Bessel filters providing best performance. Two block-bidirectional Bessel filters have been used--one for low latency and another for high accuracy. Adding the high accuracy variant of the Bessel filters to the output of ANN, SNN and variants provided statistically significant benefits with maximum gains of $\approx 5\%$ and $8\%$ in $R^2$ for two SNN topologies (SNN\_Streaming and SNN\_3D). Our work presents state of the art results for this dataset and paves the way for decoder-integrated-implants of the future.
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is a promising solution to the computation-intensive, low-latency rendering tasks of the metaverse. However, how to optimally allocate limited communication and computation resources at the edge to a large number of users in the metaverse is quite challenging. In this paper, we propose an adaptive edge resource allocation method based on multi-agent soft actor-critic with graph convolutional networks (SAC-GCN). Specifically, SAC-GCN models the multi-user metaverse environment as a graph where each agent is denoted by a node. Each agent learns the interplay between agents by graph convolutional networks with self-attention mechanism to further determine the resource usage for one user in the metaverse. The effectiveness of SAC-GCN is demonstrated through the analysis of user experience, balance of resource allocation, and resource utilization rate by taking a virtual city park metaverse as an example. Experimental results indicate that SAC-GCN outperforms other resource allocation methods in improving overall user experience, balancing resource allocation, and increasing resource utilization rate by at least 27%, 11%, and 8%, respectively.
Splitting the inference model between device, edge server, and cloud can improve the performance of EI greatly. Additionally, the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), which is the key supporting technologies of B5G/6G, can achieve massive connections and high spectrum efficiency. Motivated by the benefits of NOMA, integrating NOMA with model split in MEC to reduce the inference latency further becomes attractive. However, the NOMA based communication during split inference has not been properly considered in previous works. Therefore, in this paper, we integrate the NOMA into split inference in MEC, and propose the effective communication and computing resource allocation algorithm to accelerate the model inference at edge. Specifically, when the mobile user has a large model inference task needed to be calculated in the NOMA-based MEC, it will take the energy consumption of both device and edge server and the inference latency into account to find the optimal model split strategy, subchannel allocation strategy (uplink and downlink), and transmission power allocation strategy (uplink and downlink). Since the minimum inference delay and energy consumption cannot be satisfied simultaneously, and the variables of subchannel allocation and model split are discrete, the gradient descent (GD) algorithm is adopted to find the optimal tradeoff between them. Moreover, the loop iteration GD approach (Li-GD) is proposed to reduce the complexity of GD algorithm that caused by the parameter discrete. Additionally, the properties of the proposed algorithm are also investigated, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
Nowadays, machine learning algorithms continue to grow in complexity and require a substantial amount of computational resources and energy. For these reasons, there is a growing awareness of the development of new green algorithms and distributed AI can contribute to this. Federated learning (FL) is one of the most active research lines in machine learning, as it allows the training of collaborative models in a distributed way, an interesting option in many real-world environments, such as the Internet of Things, allowing the use of these models in edge computing devices. In this work, we present a FL method, based on a neural network without hidden layers, capable of generating a global collaborative model in a single training round, unlike traditional FL methods that require multiple rounds for convergence. This allows obtaining an effective and efficient model that simplifies the management of the training process. Moreover, this method preserve data privacy by design, a crucial aspect in current data protection regulations. We conducted experiments with large datasets and a large number of federated clients. Despite being based on a network model without hidden layers, it maintains in all cases competitive accuracy results compared to more complex state-of-the-art machine learning models. Furthermore, we show that the method performs equally well in both identically and non-identically distributed scenarios. Finally, it is an environmentally friendly algorithm as it allows significant energy savings during the training process compared to its centralized counterpart.
In this paper, we tackle the incremental maintenance of Datalog inference materialisation when the rule set can be updated. This is particularly relevant in the context of the Internet of Things and Edge computing where smart devices may need to reason over newly acquired knowledge represented as Datalog rules. Our solution is based on an adaptation of a stratification strategy applied to a dependency hypergraph whose nodes correspond to rule sets in a Datalog program. Our implementation supports recursive rules containing both negation and aggregation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system on real and synthetic data.
This paper investigates the role and the impact of control operations for dynamic mobile edge computing (MEC) empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs), in which multiple devices offload their computation tasks to an access point (AP) equipped with an edge server (ES), with the help of the RIS. While usually ignored, the control aspects related to channel estimation (CE), resource allocation (RA), and control signaling play a fundamental role in the user-perceived delay and energy consumption. In general, the higher the resources involved in the control operations, the higher their reliability; however, this introduces an overhead, which reduces the number of resources available for computation offloading, possibly increasing the overall latency experienced. Conversely, a lower control overhead translates to more resources available for computation offloading but impacts the CE accuracy and RA flexibility. This paper establishes a basic framework for integrating the impact of control operations in the performance evaluation of the RIS-aided MEC paradigm, clarifying their trade-offs through theoretical analysis and numerical simulations.
Use of edge computing in application of Computer Vision (CV) is an active field of research. Today, most CV applications make use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to inference on and interpret video data. These edge devices are responsible for several CV related tasks, such as gathering, processing and enhancing, inferencing on, and displaying video data. Due to ease of reconfiguration, computation on FPGA fabric is used to achieve such complex computation tasks. Xilinx provides the PYNQ environment as a user-friendly interface that facilitates in Hardware/Software system integration. However, to the best of authors' knowledge there is no end-to-end framework available for the PYNQ environment that allows Hardware/Software system integration and deployment of CNNs for real-time input feed from High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) input to HDMI output, along with insertion of customized hardware IPs. In this work we propose an integration of rea\textbf{L}-time image \textbf{E}nancement IP with \textbf{A}I inferencing engine in the \textbf{P}ynq environment (\textbf{LEAP}), that integrates HDMI, AI acceleration, image enhancement in the PYNQ environment for Xilinx's Microprocessor on Chip (MPSoC) platform. We evaluate our methodology with two well know CNN models, Resnet50 and YOLOv3. To validate our proposed methodology, LEAP, a simple image enhancement algorithm, histogram equalization, is designed and integrated in the FPGA fabric along with Xilinx's Deep Processing Unit (DPU). Our results show successful implementation of end-to-end integration using completely open source information.
Although multi-access edge computing (MEC) has allowed for computation offloading at the network edge, weak wireless signals in the radio access network caused by obstacles and high network load are still preventing efficient edge computation offloading, especially for user requests with stringent latency and reliability requirements. Intelligent reflective surfaces (IRS) have recently emerged as a technology capable of enhancing the quality of the signals in the radio access network, where passive reflecting elements can be tuned to improve the uplink or downlink signals. Harnessing the IRS's potential in enhancing the performance of edge computation offloading, in this paper, we study the optimized use of a system of multi-IRS along with the design of the offloading (to an edge with multi MECs) and resource allocation parameters for the purpose of minimizing the devices' energy consumption considering 5G services with stringent latency and reliability requirements. After presenting our non-convex mathematical problem, we propose a suboptimal solution based on alternating optimization where we divide the problem into sub-problems which are then solved separately. Specifically, the offloading decision is solved through a matching game algorithm, and then the IRS phase shifts and resource allocation optimizations are solved in an alternating fashion using the Difference of Convex approach. The obtained results demonstrate the gains both in energy and network resources and highlight the IRS's influence on the design of the MEC parameters.
\textit{Federated learning} (FL) and \textit{split learning} (SL) are prevailing distributed paradigms in recent years. They both enable shared global model training while keeping data localized on users' devices. The former excels in parallel execution capabilities, while the latter enjoys low dependence on edge computing resources and strong privacy protection. \textit{Split federated learning} (SFL) combines the strengths of both FL and SL, making it one of the most popular distributed architectures. Furthermore, a recent study has claimed that SFL exhibits robustness against poisoning attacks, with a fivefold improvement compared to FL in terms of robustness. In this paper, we present a novel poisoning attack known as MISA. It poisons both the top and bottom models, causing a \textbf{\underline{misa}}lignment in the global model, ultimately leading to a drastic accuracy collapse. This attack unveils the vulnerabilities in SFL, challenging the conventional belief that SFL is robust against poisoning attacks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed MISA poses a significant threat to the availability of SFL, underscoring the imperative for academia and industry to accord this matter due attention.