AdaConfigure: Reinforcement Learning-Based Adaptive Configuration for Video Analytics Services

Abstract

AbstractThe configuration in video analytics defines parameters including frame rate, image resolution, and model selection for video analytics pipeline, and thus determines the inference accuracy and resource consumption. Traditional solutions to select a configuration are either fixed (i.e., the same configuration is used all the time) or periodically adjusted using a brute-force search scheme (i.e., periodically trying different configurations and selecting the one with the best performance), and thus suffer either low inference accuracy or high computation cost to find a proper configuration timely. To this end, we propose a video analytical configuration adaptation framework called AdaConfigure that dynamically selects video configuration without resource-consuming exploration. First, we design a reinforcement learning-based framework in which an agent adaptively chooses the configuration according to the spatial and temporal features of the current video stream. In particular, we use a video segmentation strategy to capture the characteristics of the video stream with much-reduced computation cost: profiling uses only 0.2–2% computation resources as compared to a full video. Second, we design a reward function that considers both the inference accuracy and computation resource consumption so that the configuration achieves good accuracy and resource consumption trade-off. Our evaluation experiments on an object detection task show that our approach outperforms the baseline: it achieves 10–35% higher accuracy with a similar amount of computation resources or achieves similar accuracy with only 10–50% of the computation resources.KeywordsAdaptive configurationReinforcement learningVideo analytics services