DistrEE: Distributed Early Exit of Deep Neural Network Inference on Edge Devices Xian Peng, Xin Wu, Lianming Xu, Li Wang and Aiguo Fei School of Computer Science (National Pilot Software Engineering School), Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China School of Electronic Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China Abstract --Distributed DNN inference is becoming increasingly important as the demand for intelligent services at the network edge grows. By leveraging the power of distributed computing, edge devices can perform complicated and resource-hungry inference tasks previously only possible on powerful servers, enabling new applications in areas such as autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, and smart homes. However, it is challenging to achieve accurate and efficient distributed edge inference due to the fluctuating nature of the actual resources of the devices and the processing difficulty of the input data. In this work, we propose DistrEE, a distributed DNN inference framework that can exit model inference early to meet specific quality of service requirements. In particular, the framework firstly integrates model early exit and distributed inference for multi-node collaborative inferencing scenarios. Furthermore, it designs an early exit policy to control when the model inference terminates.

The distributed inference paradigm enables the computation workload to be distributed across multiple devices, facilitating the implementations of deep learning based intelligent services on extremely resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. Yet it raises great challenges to perform complicated inference tasks relying on a cluster of IoT devices that are heterogeneous in their computing/communication capacity and prone to crash or timeout failures. In this paper, we present RoCoIn, a robust cooperative inference mechanism for locally distributed execution of deep neural network-based inference tasks over heterogeneous edge devices. It creates a set of independent and compact student models that are learned from a large model using knowledge distillation for distributed deployment. In particular, the devices are strategically grouped to redundantly deploy and execute the same student model such that the inference process is resilient to any local failures, while a joint knowledge partition and student model assignment scheme are designed to minimize the response latency of the distributed inference system in the presence of devices with diverse capacities. Extensive simulations are conducted to corroborate the superior performance of our RoCoIn for distributed inference compared to several baselines, and the results demonstrate its efficacy in timely inference and failure resiliency.