This paper investigates task-oriented communication for multi-device cooperative edge inference, where a group of distributed low-end edge devices transmit the extracted features of local samples to a powerful edge server for inference. While cooperative edge inference can overcome the limited sensing capability of a single device, it substantially increases the communication overhead and may incur excessive latency. To enable low-latency cooperative inference, we propose a learning-based communication scheme that optimizes local feature extraction and distributed feature encoding in a task-oriented manner, i.e., to remove data redundancy and transmit information that is essential for the downstream inference task rather than reconstructing the data samples at the edge server. Specifically, we leverage Tishby’s information bottleneck (IB) principle [1] to extract the task-relevant feature at each edge device, and adopt the distributed information bottleneck (DIB) framework of Aguerri-Zaidi [2] to formalize a single-letter characterization of the optimal rate-relevance tradeoff for distributed feature encoding. To admit flexible control of the communication overhead, we extend the DIB framework to a distributed deterministic information bottleneck (DDIB) objective that explicitly incorporates the representational costs of the encoded features. As the IB-based objectives are computationally prohibitive for high-dimensional data, we adopt variational approximations to make the optimization problems tractable. To compensate for the potential performance loss due to the variational approximations, we also develop a selective retransmission (SR) mechanism to identify the redundancy in the encoded features among multiple edge devices to attain additional communication overhead reduction. Extensive experiments on multi-view image classification and multi-view object recognition tasks evidence that the proposed task-oriented communication scheme achieves a better rate-relevance tradeoff than existing methods.

While federated learning (FL) is promising for efficient collaborative learning without revealing local data, it remains vulnerable to white-box privacy attacks, suffers from high communication overhead, and struggles to adapt to heterogeneous models. Federated distillation (FD) emerges as an alternative paradigm to tackle these challenges, which transfers knowledge among clients instead of model parameters. Nevertheless, challenges arise due to variations in local data distributions and the absence of a well-trained teacher model, which leads to misleading and ambiguous knowledge sharing that significantly degrades model performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes aselective knowledge sharingmechanism for FD, termedSelective-FD, to identify accurate and precise knowledge from local and ensemble predictions, respectively. Empirical studies, backed by theoretical insights, demonstrate that our approach enhances the generalization capabilities of the FD framework and consistently outperforms baseline methods. We anticipate our study to enable a privacy-preserving, communication-efficient, and heterogeneity-adaptive federated training framework.

With the development of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and the increasing popularity of camera-equipped devices, many edge video analytics applications are emerging, calling for the deployment of computation-intensive AI models at the network edge. Edge inference is a promising solution to move computation-intensive workloads from low-end devices to a powerful edge server for video analytics, but device-server communications will remain a bottleneck due to limited bandwidth. This paper proposes a task-oriented communication framework for edge video analytics, where multiple devices collect the visual sensory data and transmit the informative features to an edge server for processing. To enable low-latency inference, this framework removes video redundancy in spatial and temporal domains and transmits minimal information that is essential for the downstream task, rather than reconstructing the videos on the edge server. Specifically, it extracts compact task-relevant features based on the deterministic information bottleneck (IB) principle, which characterizes a tradeoff between the informativeness of the features and the communication cost. As the features of consecutive frames are temporally correlated, we propose a temporal entropy model (TEM) to reduce the bitrate by taking the previous features as side information in feature encoding. To further improve the inference performance, we build a spatial-temporal fusion module on the server to integrate features of the current and previous frames for joint inference. Extensive experiments on video analytics tasks evidence that the proposed framework effectively encodes task-relevant information of video data and achieves a better rate-performance tradeoff than existing methods.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and their multimodal variants have led to remarkable progress across various domains, demonstrating impressive capabilities and unprecedented potential. In the era of ubiquitous connectivity, leveraging communication networks to distribute intelligence is a transformative concept, envisioning AI-powered services accessible at the network edge. However, pushing large models from the cloud to resource-constrained environments faces critical challenges. Model inference on low-end devices leads to excessive latency and performance bottlenecks, while raw data transmission over limited bandwidth networks causes high communication overhead. This article presents AI Flow, a framework that streamlines the inference process by jointly leveraging the heterogeneous resources available across devices, edge nodes, and cloud servers, making intelligence flow across networks. To facilitate cooperation among multiple computational nodes, the proposed framework explores a paradigm shift in the design of communication network systems from transmitting information flow to intelligence flow, where the goal of communications is task-oriented and folded into the inference process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework through an image captioning use case, showcasing the ability to reduce response latency while maintaining high-quality captions. This article serves as a position paper for identifying the motivation, challenges, and principles of AI Flow.