Collaborative Inference Acceleration with Non-Penetrative Tensor Partitioning

The inference of large-sized images on Internet of Things (IoT) devices is commonly hindered by limited resources, while there are often stringent latency requirements for Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference. Currently, this problem is generally addressed by collaborative inference, where the large-sized image is partitioned into multiple tiles, and each tile is assigned to an IoT device for processing. However, since significant latency will be incurred due to the communication overhead caused by tile sharing, the existing collaborative inference strategy is inefficient for convolutional computation, which is indispensable for any DNN. To reduce it, we propose Non-Penetrative Tensor Partitioning (NPTP), a fine-grained tensor partitioning method that reduces the communication latency by minimizing the communication load of tiles shared, thereby reducing inference latency. We evaluate NPTP with four widely-adopted DNN models. Experimental results demonstrate that NPTP achieves a 1.44-1.68x inference speedup relative to CoEdge, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) collaborative inference algorithm.