MANE: A Multi-Path Adaptive Network for Edge Onloading of Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2609.14660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Split computing constitutes a widely used distributed inference approach, where a lightweight head model is onloaded onto the device and a heavier tail model resides on an edge server, leveraging the growing computational capabilities of modern System-on-Chips while alleviating server load. As intelligent indoor environments such as smart offices grow increasingly populated with diverse IoT devices, a single edge server must simultaneously assist multiple devices, each competing for the same shared inference resources. Without a principled mechanism to manage this shared load, the server is quickly overwhelmed, causing latency SLO violations and rendering server-assisted inference ineffective. In this work, we present MANE, a distributed inference framework that equips the server with a multi-path tail architecture, enabling a dynamic accuracy--throughput trade-off at runtime. By introducing a novel multi-path model architecture, a three-stage training scheme featuring a Joint Head Network Distillation loss and a hysteresis-based scheduler with an equitable device-fallback policy, MANE maintains over 80% SLO satisfaction rate where state-of-the-art onloading methods fail completely, while preserving accuracy 6pp higher than on-device alternatives, across up to 40 concurrent devices.

Abstract:Split computing constitutes a widely used distributed inference approach, where a lightweight head model is onloaded onto the device and a heavier tail model resides on an edge server, leveraging the growing computational capabilities of modern System-on-Chips while alleviating server load. As intelligent indoor environments such as smart offices grow increasingly populated with diverse IoT devices, a single edge server must simultaneously assist multiple devices, each competing for the same shared inference resources. Without a principled mechanism to manage this shared load, the server is quickly overwhelmed, causing latency SLO violations and rendering server-assisted inference ineffective. In this work, we present MANE, a distributed inference framework that equips the server with a multi-path tail architecture, enabling a dynamic accuracy--throughput trade-off at runtime. By introducing a novel multi-path model architecture, a three-stage training scheme featuring a Joint Head Network Distillation loss and a hysteresis-based scheduler with an equitable device-fallback policy, MANE maintains over 80% SLO satisfaction rate where state-of-the-art onloading methods fail completely, while preserving accuracy 6pp higher than on-device alternatives, across up to 40 concurrent devices.

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.14660 [cs.DC]

(or arXiv:2609.14660v1 [cs.DC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.14660 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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MANE: A Multi-Path Adaptive Network for Edge Onloading of Deep Neural Networks

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