Achieving Pareto Optimality using Efficient Parameter Reduction for DNNs in Resource-Constrained Edge Environment

This paper proposes an optimization of an existing Deep Neural Network (DNN) that improves its hardware utilization and facilitates on-device training for resource-constrained edge environments. We implement efficient parameter reduction strategies on Xception that shrink the model size without sacrificing accuracy, thus decreasing memory utilization during training. We evaluate our model in two experiments: Caltech-101 image classification and PCB defect detection and compare its performance against the original Xception and lightweight models, EfficientNetV2B1 and MobileNetV2. The results of the Caltech-101 image classification show that our model has a better test accuracy (76.21%) than Xception (75.89%), uses less memory on average (847.9MB) than Xception (874.6MB), and has faster training and inference times. The lightweight models overfit with EfficientNetV2B1 having a 30.52% test accuracy and MobileNetV2 having a 58.11% test accuracy. Both lightweight models have better memory usage than our model and Xception. On the PCB defect detection, our model has the best test accuracy (90.30%), compared to Xception (88.10%), EfficientNetV2B1 (55.25%), and MobileNetV2 (50.50%). MobileNetV2 has the least average memory usage (849.4MB), followed by our model (865.8MB), then EfficientNetV2B1 (874.8MB), and Xception has the highest (893.6MB). We further experiment with pre-trained weights and observe that memory usage decreases thereby showing the benefits of transfer learning. A Pareto analysis of the models' performance shows that our optimized model architecture satisfies accuracy and low memory utilization objectives.

Evaluating Multi-Global Server Architecture for Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) with a single global server framework is currently a popular approach for training machine learning models on decentralized environment, such as mobile devices and edge devices. However, the centralized server architecture poses a risk as any challenge on the central/global server would result in the failure of the entire system. To minimize this risk, we propose a novel federated learning framework that leverages the deployment of multiple global servers. We posit that implementing multiple global servers in federated learning can enhance efficiency by capitalizing on local collaborations and aggregating knowledge, and the error tolerance in regard to communication failure in the single server framework would be handled. We therefore propose a novel framework that leverages the deployment of multiple global servers. We conducted a series of experiments using a dataset containing the event history of electric vehicle (EV) charging at numerous stations. We deployed a federated learning setup with multiple global servers and client servers, where each client-server strategically represented a different region and a global server was responsible for aggregating local updates from those devices. Our preliminary results of the global models demonstrate that the difference in performance attributed to multiple servers is less than 1%. While the hypothesis of enhanced model efficiency was not as expected, the rule for handling communication challenges added to the algorithm could resolve the error tolerance issue. Future research can focus on identifying specific uses for the deployment of multiple global servers.

ECAvg: An Edge-Cloud Collaborative Learning Approach using Averaged Weights

The use of edge devices together with cloud provides a collaborative relationship between both classes of devices where one complements the shortcomings of the other. Resource-constraint edge devices can benefit from the abundant computing power provided by servers by offloading computationally intensive tasks to the server. Meanwhile, edge devices can leverage their close proximity to the data source to perform less computationally intensive tasks on the data. In this paper, we propose a collaborative edge-cloud paradigm called ECAvg in which edge devices pre-train local models on their respective datasets and transfer the models to the server for fine-tuning. The server averages the pre-trained weights into a global model, which is fine-tuned on the combined data from the various edge devices. The local (edge) models are then updated with the weights of the global (server) model. We implement a CIFAR-10 classification task using MobileNetV2, a CIFAR-100 classification task using ResNet50, and an MNIST classification using a neural network with a single hidden layer. We observed performance improvement in the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 classification tasks using our approach, where performance improved on the server model with averaged weights and the edge models had a better performance after model update. On the MNIST classification, averaging weights resulted in a drop in performance on both the server and edge models due to negative transfer learning. From the experiment results, we conclude that our approach is successful when implemented on deep neural networks such as MobileNetV2 and ResNet50 instead of simple neural networks.