Federated Learning (FL) empowers multiple clients to collaboratively learn a model, enlarging the training data of each client for high accuracy while protecting data privacy. However, when deploying FL in real-time edge systems, the heterogeneity of devices among systems has a severe impact on the performance of the inferred model. Existing optimizations on FL focus on improving the training efficiency but fail to speed up inference, especially when there is a latency constraint. In this work, we propose Collate, a novel training framework that collaboratively learns heterogeneous models to meet the latency constraints of multiple edge systems simultaneously. We design a dynamic zeroizing-recovering method to adjust each local model architecture for high accuracy under its latency constraint. A proto-corrected federated aggregation scheme is also introduced to aggregate all heterogeneous local models, satisfying the latency constraint of different systems with only one training process and maintaining high accuracy. Extensive experiments indicate that, compared to state-of-the-art methods and under a latency constraint, our extended models can improve the accuracy by 1.96% on average, and our shrunk models can also obtain a 3.09% accuracy improvement on average, with almost no extra training overhead. The related codes and data will be available at https://github.com/ntuliuteam/Collate
Deep learning applications have been widely adopted on edge devices, to mitigate the privacy and latency issues of accessing cloud servers. Deciding the number of neurons during the design of a deep neural network to maximize performance is not intuitive. Particularly, many application scenarios are real-time and have a strict latency constraint, while conventional neural network optimization methods do not directly change the temporal cost of model inference for latency-critical edge systems. In this work, we propose a latency-oriented neural network learning method to optimize models for high accuracy while fulfilling the latency constraint. For efficiency, we also introduce a universal hardware-customized latency predictor to optimize this procedure to learn a model that satisfies the latency constraint by only a one-shot training process. The experiment results reveal that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach can well-fit the 'hard' latency constraint and achieve high accuracy. Under the same training settings as the original model and satisfying a 34 ms latency constraint on the ImageNet-100 dataset, we reduce GoogLeNet's latency from 40.32 ms to 34 ms with a 0.14% accuracy reduction on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano. When coupled with quantization, our method can be further improved to only 0.04% drop for GoogLeNet. On the NVIDIA Jetson TX2, we compress VGG-19 from 119.98 ms to 34 ms and even improve its accuracy by 0.5%, and we scale GoogLeNet up from 20.27 ms to 34 ms and achieve higher accuracy by 0.78%. We also open source this framework at https://github.com/ntuliuteam/ZeroBN