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Quantization Compensator Network: Server-Side Feature Reconstruction in Partitioned IoT Systems
Mid Sweden University, Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, Sundsvall, 85230, Sweden.
Mid Sweden University, Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, Sundsvall, 85230, Sweden, Institute of Computer Technology, TU Wien, Christian Doppler Laboratory for Embedded Machine Learning, Vienna, 1040, Austria.
Mid Sweden University, Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, Sundsvall, 85230, Sweden, Institut für Mikroelektronik- und Mechatronik-Systeme gemeinnützige GmbH (IMMS GmbH), Ilmenau, 98693, Germany.
Mid Sweden University, Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, Sundsvall, 85230, Sweden.
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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
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. , 2025. Vol. 13, p. 186488-186508
Keywords [en]
1-bit quantization, accuracy recovery, deep learning, deep vision, edge computing, feature map reconstruction, Internet of Things (IoT), QCNets, quantization compensation networks, server-side reconstruction, system partitioning, tiny ML, Computer system recovery, Computer vision, Internet of things, Learning systems, Compensation network, Feature map, Internet of thing, Machine-learning, Map reconstruction, Qcnet, Quantisation, Quantization compensation network, Server sides, Tiny machine learning, Economic and social effects
National Category
Communication Systems Telecommunications Computer Systems
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-79904DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3627072Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105020705518OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-79904DiVA, id: diva2:2018895
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Article; Granskad

Available from: 2025-12-04 Created: 2025-12-04 Last updated: 2025-12-04Bibliographically approved

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