Range Asymmetric Numeral Systems-Based Lightweight Intermediate Feature Compression for Split Computing of Deep Neural Networks

Split computing distributes deep neural network inference between resource-constrained edge devices and cloud servers but faces significant communication bottlenecks when transmitting intermediate features. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel lightweight compression framework that leverages Range Asymmetric Numeral Systems (rANS) encoding with asymmetric integer quantization and sparse tensor representation to reduce transmission overhead dramatically. Specifically, our approach combines asymmetric integer quantization with a sparse representation technique, eliminating the need for complex probability modeling or network modifications. The key contributions include: (1) a distribution-agnostic compression pipeline that exploits inherent tensor sparsity to achieve bandwidth reduction with minimal computational overhead; (2) an approximate theoretical model that optimizes tensor reshaping dimensions to maximize compression efficiency; and (3) a GPU-accelerated implementation with sub-millisecond encoding/decoding latency. Extensive evaluations across diverse neural architectures (ResNet, VGG16, MobileNetV2, SwinT, DenseNet121, EfficientNetB0) demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently maintains near-baseline accuracy across CIFAR100 and ImageNet benchmarks. Moreover, we validated the framework's effectiveness on advanced natural language processing tasks by employing Llama2 7B and 13B on standard benchmarks such as MMLU, HellaSwag, ARC, PIQA, Winogrande, BoolQ, and OpenBookQA, demonstrating its broad applicability beyond computer vision. Furthermore, this method addresses a fundamental bottleneck in deploying sophisticated artificial intelligence systems in bandwidth-constrained environments without compromising model performance.

Memory- and Latency-Constrained Inference of Large Language Models via Adaptive Split Computing

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved near-human performance across diverse reasoning tasks, yet their deployment on resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices remains impractical due to massive parameter footprints and memory-intensive autoregressive decoding. While split computing offers a promising solution by partitioning model execution between edge devices and cloud servers, existing approaches fail to address the unique challenges of autoregressive inference, particularly the iterative token generation process and expanding key-value (KV) cache requirements. This work introduces the first autoregressive-aware split computing framework designed explicitly for LLM deployment on edge devices. Our approach makes three key contributions. First, we develop one-point split compression (OPSC), a mixed-precision quantization scheme that prevents out-of-memory failures by strategically partitioning models into front-end and back-end segments with different precision levels. Second, we propose a two-stage intermediate compression pipeline that combines threshold splitting (TS) and token-wise adaptive bit quantization (TAB-Q) to preserve accuracy-critical activations while dramatically reducing communication overhead. Third, we formulate a unified optimization framework that jointly selects optimal split points, quantization settings, and sequence lengths to satisfy strict memory and latency constraints. Extensive evaluations across diverse LLMs and hardware platforms demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art quantization methods, including SmoothQuant, OmniQuant, and Atom. The framework achieves a 1.49 inference speedup and significant communication overhead reduction while maintaining or improving model accuracy.