EcoFair: Energy-Efficient Inference Routing for Edge AI under Data Degradation

Abstract:Medical edge-AI systems must operate under a difficult tension: delivering reliable diagnostic inference while running on devices with limited battery capacity, memory, and compute. In dermatology, this problem is amplified by real-world image degradation caused by smartphone capture, poor lighting, blur, compression, and heterogeneous edge sensors. To handle these degraded inputs, deploying a heavyweight model can improve reliability, but it rapidly increases the energy burden on resource-constrained devices. Conversely, always using a lightweight model saves energy but may be less reliable on ambiguous or degraded inputs. This paper introduces EcoFair, a vertically partitioned inference framework for dermatology classification in which image and tabular inputs remain local to edge clients while only learned modality-specific representations are transmitted for server-side fusion. EcoFair first processes each sample using a lightweight image encoder and then decides whether additional heavyweight computation is necessary. Escalation is triggered when the lightweight prediction exhibits high uncertainty, a narrow separation between safe and high-risk classes, or elevated metadata-derived risk from patient age and lesion location. Across HAM10000, BCN20000, and PAD-UFES-20, EcoFair is evaluated using multiple lightweight--heavy backbone pairings to quantify the trade-off between energy consumption, diagnostic performance, and worst-group malignant-case recall. Results show that EcoFair can reduce per-sample image-inference energy by up to 68\% relative to always using the heavyweight encoder, while selectively allocating additional computation under difficult data regimes to support inference reliability. Group-level analysis further shows configuration-dependent effects, with improvements in selected model--dataset settings and mixed behaviour in others.

16 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables. Code and supplementary materials available at this https URL

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

C.2.4; I.2.6; I.2.11

arXiv:2603.26483 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2603.26483v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.26483 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2026.104403 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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