Automated Customization of On-Device Inference for Quality-of-Experience Enhancement

Abstract

The rapid uptake of intelligent applications is pushing deep learning (DL) capabilities to mobile devices. However, the heterogeneities in device capacity, DNN performances, and user preferences make it challenging to provide satisfactory Quality of Experience (QoE) to mobile users. This paper studies automated customization for DL inference on mobile devices (termed as on-device inference), and our goal is to enhance user QoE by configuring the on-device inference with an appropriate DNN for users under different usage scenarios. The core of our method is a DNN selection module that learns user QoE patterns on-the-fly and identifies the best-fit DNN for on-device inference with the learned knowledge. It leverages an online learning algorithm, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">NeuralUCB</i> , that has excellent generalization ability for handling various user QoE patterns. We also embed the knowledge transfer technique in NeuralUCB to expedite the learning process. However, NeuralUCB frequently solicits QoE ratings from users, which incurs non-negligible inconvenience. To address this problem, we design feedback solicitation schemes to reduce the number of QoE solicitations while maintaining the learning efficiency of NeuralUCB. A pragmatic problem, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">aggregated QoE</i> , is further investigated to improve the practicality of our framework. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world data. The results indicate that our method efficiently learns the user QoE pattern with few solicitations and provides drastic QoE enhancement for mobile devices.