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 device-application combination


Metadata-Guided Adaptable Frequency Scaling across Heterogeneous Applications and Devices

Yan, Jinqi, He, Fang, Sang, Qianlong, Tong, Bifeng, Sun, Peng, Gong, Yili, Hu, Chuang, Cheng, Dazhao

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Abstract--Dynamic V oltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) is essential for enhancing energy efficiency in mobile platforms. However, traditional heuristic-based governors are increasingly inadequate for managing the complexity of heterogeneous System-on-Chip designs and diverse application workloads. Although reinforcement learning approaches offer improved performance, their poor generalization capability and reliance on extensive retraining for each hardware and application combination leads to significant deployment costs. In this work, we observe that device and application metadata inherently encapsulate valuable knowledge for DVFS, presenting an opportunity to overcome these limitations. We formulate DVFS for heterogeneous devices and applications as a multi-task reinforcement learning problem. We introduce MetaDVFS, which is a metadata-guided framework that systematically leverages metadata to discover and transfer shared knowledge across DVFS tasks. Evaluations on five Google Pixel devices running six applications show that MetaDVFS achieves up to 17% improvement in Performance-Power Ratio and up to 26% improvement in Quality of Experience. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, MetaDVFS delivers 70.8% faster adaptation (3.5 1.1 vs. 11.8 5.2 minutes) and 5.8-27.6% These results establish MetaDVFS as an effective and scalable solution for DVFS deployment in heterogeneous mobile environments. Dynamic V oltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) is an essential technique for effectively improving energy efficiency in battery-powered mobile platforms. DVFS adjusts the operating voltage and frequency of a device in response to current workload demands [1]. Experimental evaluations report energy savings exceeding 26% on mobile MPSoCs where DVFS functions compared to statically managed systems [2]. Traditional DVFS policies typically rely on heuristic-based governors, such as ondemand and schedutil, which make frequency decisions based primarily on simple utilization metrics. Jinqi Y an, Qianlong Sang, Yili Gong, Chuang Hu, and Dazhao Cheng are with the School of Computer Science, Wuhan University.