arXiv:2603.12269cs.ARcs.AI2026-03被引 1

根据输入难易度动态调整深度神经网络退出阈值,显著提升边缘设备推理效率。

DART: Input-Difficulty-AwaRe Adaptive Threshold for Early-Exit DNNs

  • 引入轻量级难度估计模块,实时量化输入复杂度。
  • 实现3.3倍加速、5.1倍节能,平均功耗降低42%。
  • 适用于资源受限场景,尤其适合边缘AI部署。

早期退出深度神经网络通过在达到足够置信度时提前终止计算,实现自适应推理,降低边缘AI加速器在资源受限环境下的开销。现有方法依赖次优的退出策略,忽略输入难度,且独立优化阈值。本文提出DART(输入难易度感知自适应阈值)框架,包含三项关键创新:(1) 轻量级难度估计模块,以极低计算开销量化输入复杂度;(2) 基于动态规划的联合退出策略优化算法;(3) 自适应系数管理机制。在多种DNN基准(AlexNet、ResNet-18、VGG-16)上的实验表明,DART相比静态网络实现最高3.3倍加速、5.1倍能效降低,平均功耗降低达42%,同时保持竞争力准确率。将DART扩展至视觉变换器(LeViT)后,功耗降低5.0倍、执行时间提升3.6倍,但准确率下降最多17个百分点,凸显针对变换器设计专用早期退出机制的必要性。我们进一步提出难度感知效率评分(DAES),DART在该指标上相较基线最高提升14.8,体现其在准确率、效率与鲁棒性之间的更优权衡。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Early-exit deep neural networks enable adaptive inference by terminating computation when sufficient confidence is achieved, reducing cost for edge AI accelerators in resource-constrained settings. Existing methods, however, rely on suboptimal exit policies, ignore input difficulty, and optimize thresholds independently. This paper introduces DART (Input-Difficulty-Aware Adaptive Threshold), a framework that overcomes these limitations. DART introduces three key innovations: (1) a lightweight difficulty estimation module that quantifies input complexity with minimal computational overhead, (2) a joint exit policy optimization algorithm based on dynamic programming, and (3) an adaptive coefficient management system. Experiments on diverse DNN benchmarks (AlexNet, ResNet-18, VGG-16) demonstrate that DART achieves up to \textbf{3.3$\times$} speedup, \textbf{5.1$\times$} lower energy, and up to \textbf{42\%} lower average power compared to static networks, while preserving competitive accuracy. Extending DART to Vision Transformers (LeViT) yields power (5.0$\times$) and execution-time (3.6$\times$) gains but also accuracy loss (up to 17 percent), underscoring the need for transformer-specific early-exit mechanisms. We further introduce the Difficulty-Aware Efficiency Score (DAES), a novel multi-objective metric, under which DART achieves up to a 14.8 improvement over baselines, highlighting superior accuracy, efficiency, and robustness trade-offs.

边缘计算早期退出能效优化

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