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Quantization compensator network: server-side feature reconstruction in partitioned IoT systems
Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-3351-0491
Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden; Christian Doppler Laboratory for Embedded Machine Learning, Institute of Computer Technology, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria.
Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden; Institut für Mikroelektronik- und Mechatronik-Systeme gemeinnützige GmbH (IMMS GmbH), Ilmenau, Germany.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0282-5471
Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-9903-1338
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2025 (English)In: IEEE Access, E-ISSN 2169-3536, Vol. 13, p. 186488-186508Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

With the growing number of IoT devices generating data at the edge, there is a rising demand to run machine learning (ML) models directly on these resource-constrained nodes. To overcome hardware limitations, a common approach is to partition the model between the node and a more capable edge or cloud server. However, this introduces a communication bottleneck, especially for transmitting intermediate feature maps. Extreme quantization, such as 1-bit quantization, drastically reduces communication cost but causes significant accuracy degradation. Existing solutions like full-model retraining offer limited recovery, while methods such as autoencoders shift computational burden to the IoT node. In this work, we propose Quantization Compensator Network (QCNet)—a lightweight, server-side module that reconstructs high-fidelity feature maps directly from 1-bit quantized data. QCNet is used alongside fine-tuning of the server-side model and introduces no additional computation on the IoT node. We evaluate QCNet across diverse vision models (ResNet50, ViT-B/16, ConvNeXt Tiny, and YOLOv3 Tiny) and tasks (classification, detection), showing that it consistently outperforms standard dequantization, autoencoder-based, and Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) approaches. Remarkably, QCNet achieves accuracy close to—or even surpassing—that of the original unpartitioned models, while maintaining a favorable accuracy–latency trade-off. QCNet offers a practical and efficient solution for enabling accurate distributed intelligence on communication- and compute-limited IoT platforms.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IEEE, 2025. Vol. 13, p. 186488-186508
Keywords [en]
QCNets, quantization compensation networks, 1-bit quantization, feature map reconstruction, server-side reconstruction, accuracy recovery, system partitioning, edge computing, Internet of Things (IoT), deep vision, tiny ML, deep learning
National Category
Other Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering
Research subject
computer and systems sciences; Computer Science; Computer Systems
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-246350DOI: 10.1109/access.2025.3627072ISI: 001609440200021Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105020705518OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-246350DiVA, id: diva2:2013400
Available from: 2025-11-12 Created: 2025-11-12 Last updated: 2025-11-21Bibliographically approved

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Nordström, Tomas

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