CPSLab Cyber-Physical Systems Lab, Boston University

Publications Neural Network Control

Unified Local-Cloud Decision-Making via Reinforcement Learning

Kathakoli Sengupta, Zhongkai Shangguan, Sandesh Bharadwaj, Sanjay Arora, Eshed Ohn-Bar, Renato Mancuso

18th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2024), 2024, Milan, Italy

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Fig. 1: Overview of UniLCD. Our system comprises a situational routing module, which takes the current embedding and a history of previous actions. Local actions are predicted by a pre-trained lightweight model that can be deployed efficiently on a the mobile system. The sample-efficient routing module, trained via RL, determines whether to implement the local action or transmit the scene embedding to the cloud server model, which is more accurate but computationally expensive and induces latenc

Abstract

Embodied vision-based real-world systems, such as mobile robots, require a careful balance between energy consumption, compute latency, and safety constraints to optimize operation across dynamic tasks and contexts. As local computation tends to be restricted, offloading the computation, i.e., to a remote server, can save local resources while providing access to high-quality predictions from powerful and large models. However, the resulting communication and latency overhead has led to limited usability of cloud models in dynamic, safety-critical, real-time settings. To effectively address this trade-off, we introduce UniLCD, a novel hybrid inference framework for enabling flexible local-cloud collaboration. By efficiently optimizing a flexible routing module via reinforcement learning and a suitable multi-task objective, UniLCD is specifically designed to support the multiple constraints of safety-critical end-to-end mobile systems. We validate the proposed approach using a challenging, crowded navigation task requiring frequent and timely switching between local and cloud operations. UniLCD demonstrates improved overall performance and efficiency, by over 23% compared to state-of-the-art baselines based on various split computing and early exit strategies. Our code is available at https://unilcd.github.io/.

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Cite this paper

@inproceedings{UniCL_ECCV24,
  title     = {{Unified Local-Cloud Decision-Making via Reinforcement Learning}},
  author    = {Sengupta, Kathakoli and Shangguan, Zhongkai and Bharadwaj, Sandesh and Arora, Sanjay and Ohn-Bar, Eshed and Mancuso, Renato},
  booktitle = {18th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2024)},
  year      = 2024,
  pages     = {185--203},
  publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},
  address   = {Milan, Italy},
  url       = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11403}
}

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