State-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) yield record-breaking predictive performance, yet at the cost of high-energy-consumption inference, that prohibits their widely deployments in resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) applications. We propose a dual dynamic inference (DDI) framework that highlights the following aspects: 1) we integrate both input-dependent and resource-dependent dynamic inference mechanisms under a unified framework in order to fit the varying IoT resource requirements in practice. DDI is able to both constantly suppress unnecessary costs for easy samples, and to halt inference for all samples to meet hard resource constraints enforced; 2) we propose a flexible multigrained learning to skip (MGL2S) approach for input-dependent inference which allows simultaneous layer-wise and channelwise skipping; 3) we extend DDI to complex CNN backbones such as DenseNet and show that DDI can be applied towards optimizing any specific resource goals including inference latency or energy cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior inference accuracy-resource trade-off achieved by DDI, as well as the flexibility to control such trade-offs compared to existing peer methods. Specifically, DDI can achieve up to 4 times computational savings with the same or even higher accuracy as compared to existing competitive baselines.

No abstract

Despite the popularity of decentralized controller learning, very few successes have been demonstrated on learning to control large robot swarms using raw visual observations. To fill in this gap, we present Vision-based Graph Aggregation and Inference (VGAI), a decentralized learning-to-control framework that directly maps raw visual observations to agent actions, aided by sparse local communication among only neighboring agents. Our framework is implemented by an innovative cascade of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and one graph neural network (GNN), addressing agent-level visual perception and feature learning, as well as swarm-level local information aggregation and agent action inference, respectively. Using the application example of drone flocking, we show that VGAI yields comparable or more competitive performance with other decentralized controllers, and even the centralized controller that learns from global information. Especially, it shows substantial scalability to learn over large swarms (e.g., 50 agents), thanks to the integration between visual perception and local communication.

No abstract

Decentralized coordination of a robot swarm requires addressing the tension between local perceptions and actions, and the accomplishment of a global objective. In this work, we propose to learn decentralized controllers based solely on raw visual inputs. For the first time, this integrates the learning of two key components: communication and visual perception, in one end-to-end framework. More specifically, we consider that each robot has access to a visual perception of the immediate surroundings, and communication capabilities to transmit and receive messages from other neighboring robots. Our proposed learning framework combines a convolutional neural network (CNN) for each robot to extract messages from the visual inputs, and a graph neural network (GNN) over the entire swarm to transmit, receive and process these messages in order to decide on actions. The use of a GNN and locally-run CNNs results naturally in a decentralized controller. We jointly train the CNNs and the GNN so that each robot learns to extract messages from the images that are adequate for the team as a whole. Our experiments demonstrate the proposed architecture in the problem of drone flocking and show its promising performance and scalability, e.g., achieving successful decentralized flocking for large-sized swarms.