Quantization Compensator Network: Server-Side Feature Reconstruction in Partitioned IoT SystemsShow others and affiliations
2025 (English)In: IEEE Access, E-ISSN 2169-3536, Vol. 13, p. 186488-186508
Article 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
Note
Article; Granskad
2025-12-042025-12-042025-12-04Bibliographically approved