SparseDVFS: Sparse-Aware DVFS for Energy-Efficient Edge Inference

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21908v1
• Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:29:30 GMT
• Title: SparseDVFS: Sparse-Aware DVFS for Energy-Efficient Edge Inference
• Abstract summary: This paper presents SparseDVFS, a fine-grained, sparse-aware DVFS framework for energy-efficient edge inference.<n>Our key insight is that operator sparsity is a primary metric for hardware frequency modulation.<n>SparseDVFS achieves an average 78.17% energy efficiency gain over state-of-the-art solutions.
• Score: 24.06892697687466
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on power-sensitive edge devices presents a formidable challenge. While Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) is widely employed for energy optimization, traditional model-level scaling is often too coarse to capture intra-inference variations, whereas fine-grained operator-level scaling suffers from prohibitive performance degradation due to significant hardware switching latency. This paper presents SparseDVFS, a fine-grained, sparse-aware DVFS framework designed for energy-efficient edge inference. Our key insight is that operator sparsity is a primary metric for hardware frequency modulation. By distinguishing between compute-bound dense operators and memory-bound sparse operators, the system can apply specialized frequency triplets to maximize energy efficiency. To overcome switching overheads and component interference, SparseDVFS incorporates three key innovations: (1) an offline modeler that established a deterministic mapping between operator sparsity and optimal frequency triplets (CPU/GPU/EMC) via white-box timeline analysis; (2) a runtime graph partitioner that utilizes a greedy merging heuristic to aggregate operators into super-blocks, balancing scaling granularity and DVFS switching latency through a latency amortization constraint; and (3) a unified co-governor that employs a frequency unified scaling engine (FUSE) and a look-ahead instruction queue to eliminate antagonistic effects between independent controllers and hide hardware transition latencies. Extensive evaluations show that SparseDVFS achieves an average 78.17% energy efficiency gain over state-of-the-art solutions while maintaining a superior 14% cost-gain ratio.

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