The Intelligent System Lab at University of Pittsburgh conducts research on On-device AI, Mobile and embedded systems, Mobile and connected health, Cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things, and more!
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Our research aims to enable high-performance AI inference and training on resource-constrained mobile and embedded devices, to enable emerging applications such as AIoT, smart health and embodied AI. We utilize fine-grained and explainable knowledge about AI model execution to determine the most efficient part of the model for on-device training and inference, and employ modular neural networks that incorporate domain knowledge of specific system applications into the neural network module design. Our recent research focuses on enabling computational efficient inference and training of modern Large Language Models (LLMs) on weak devices, to efficiently incorporate these devices’ rich varieties of data modalities into the LLMs’ representation power and hence allow more flexible domain adaptation and model personalization.
MobiCom'24Image super-resolution (SR) is widely used on mobile devices to enhance user experience. However, neural networks used for SR are computationally expensive, posing challenges for mobile devices with limited computing power. A viable solution is to use heterogeneous processors on mobile devices, especially the specialized hardware AI accelerators, but the reduced arithmetic precision on AI accelerators can lead to degraded perceptual quality in upscaled images. To address this limitation, we present a novel image SR technique that enhances the perceptual quality of upscaled images when using heterogeneous processors for SR computations. It strategically splits the SR model and dispatches different layers to heterogeneous processors, to meet the time constraint while minimizing the impact of AI accelerators on image quality. Experiment results show that our method outperforms the best baselines, improving perceptual image quality by up to 2×, or reducing SR computing latency by up to 5.6× with on-par image quality.
ArXiv preprint
ArXiv preprint
2024 ICLR
ArXiv preprintFederated Learning (FL) efficiency is influenced by intertwined data and device heterogeneities. Traditionally, these factors are treated separately, which becomes ineffective in addressing staleness issue due to asynchronous FL. We introduce a novel FL framework employing the gradient inversion technique to get estimations of clients’ local training data from their uploaded stale model updates, and use these estimations to compute non-stale client model updates, which addresses both data quality and privacy concerns. Experiments on mainstream datasets reveal our approach enhances model accuracy by up to 20% and accelerates FL training by up to 35% over existing methods.
MobiSys'23
MobiCom'22
The versatility of recent emerging AI techniques also brings challenges in ensuring the AI systems to be safe, fair, explainable, and to cause no harm. Our research aims at discovering potential malicious adaptations to AI models, and propose protections and mitigations against unwanted model usages.
ArXiv preprint
Recent technical advances of sensing, computation and communication on mobile and embedded devices, such as smartphones and wearables, highlights the possibility of pervasive monitoring and unobtrusive diagnostics of various acute or chronic diseases, as convenient yet low-cost alternatives of medical-grade methods without any involvement of clinicians. Our research aims to fully unleash such potential of today’s mobile and embedded devices towards accurate, efficient yet cost-effective solutions to mobile and connected health, by employing modern AI tools and developing new AI algorithms to properly extract biomarkers from the mobile sensory data and provide sufficient interpretability to the extracted biomarkers. Currently, our integrated sensing and AI systems have been widely applied to various clinical applications including pulmonary telemedicine, post-discharge heart failure risk evaluation and mitigation, and orthopedic disease evaluation.
MobiSys'23
Our AWARE dataset consists of a group of human airway measurements, produced by our integrated AI and sensing systems for smart pulmonary telemedicine. The PTEase paper makes use of the AWARE dataset.
MobiCom'20
Edge computing remains a viable solution in task offloading to balance between network latency and computational power. Our research focuses on the co-design between mobile and edge systems to achieve better efficiency on mobile applications with heavy workload, such as mobile VR rendering.
IPSN'22
ASPLOS'22
MobiSys'20
IPSN'19
2018 IEEE SEC
Wireless communications, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee, play an important role in IoT and mobile application. However, the noisy wireless channel conditions and interference makes such communication less effective. Our research focuses on physical layer designs, and apply AI-assisted techniques for intereference cancellation and efficiency improvement.
SenSys'22
MobiSys'22