Auto-Tiler: Variable-Dimension Autoencoder with Tiling for Compressing Intermediate Feature Space of Deep Neural Networks for Internet of Things

Due to limited resources of the Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices, deep neural network (DNN) inference requires collaboration with cloud server platforms, where DNN inference is partitioned and offloaded to high-performance servers to reduce end-to-end latency. As data-intensive intermediate feature space at the partitioned layer should be transmitted to the servers, efficient compression of the feature space is imperative for high-throughput inference. However, the feature space at deeper layers has different characteristics than natural images, limiting the compression performance by conventional preprocessing and encoding techniques. To tackle this limitation, we introduce a new method for compressing DNN intermediate feature space using a specialized autoencoder, called auto-tiler. The proposed auto-tiler is designed to include the tiling process and provide multiple input/output dimensions to support various partitioned layers and compression ratios. The results show that auto-tiler achieves 18% to 67% higher percent point accuracy compared to the existing methods at the same bitrate while reducing the process latency by 73% to 81%. The dimension variability of an auto-tiler also reduces the storage overhead by 62% with negligible accuracy loss.