The parallel advancement of AI and IoT technologies has recently boosted the development of multi-modal computing ($M^{2}C$) on pervasive autonomous embedded systems (AES).$M^{2}C$takes advantage of data from different modalities such as images, audio, and text and is able to achieve notable improvements in accuracy. However, achieving these accuracy gains often comes at the cost of increased computational complexity and energy consumption. Furthermore, the presence of numerous advanced sensors in these systems significantly contributes to power consumption, exacerbating the issue of limited power resources. Collectively, these challenges pose difficulties in deploying$M^{2}C$on small embedded devices with scarce energy resources. In this article, we propose anAdaptiveModalityGating technique calledAMGfor in-situ$M^{2}C$applications. The primary objective ofAMGis to conserve energy while preserving the accuracy advantages of$M^{2}C$. To achieve this goal,AMGincorporates two first-of-its-kind designs. Firstly, it introduces a novel semi-gating architecture that enables partial modality sensor power gating. Specifically, we devise the de-centralizedAMG(D-AMG) and centralizedAMG(C-AMG) architecture. The former buffers raw data on sensors while the latter buffers raw data on the computing board, which are suitable for different edge scenarios respectively. Secondly, it facilitates a self-initialization/tuning process on the AES, which is supported by carefully-built analytical model. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness ofAMG. It achieves a 1.6x to 3.8x throughput higher than other power management methods and improves the lifespan of AES by 10% to 280% longer within the same energy budget, while satisfying all performance and latency requirements across various scenarios.

The wide adoption of edge AI has heightened the demand for various battery-less and maintenance-free smart systems. Nevertheless, emerging Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) are complex workloads showing increased power demand, diversified power usage patterns, and unique sensitivity to power management (PM) approaches. Existing AIoT devices cannot select the most appropriate PM tuning knob, and therefore they often make sub-optimal decisions. In addition, these PM solutions always assume traditional power regulation circuit which incurs non-negligible power loss and control overhead. This can greatly compromise the potential of AIoT efficiency. In this paper, we explore power management optimization for emerging self-powered AIoT devices. We propose WASP, a highly efficient power management scheme for workload-aware, self-powered AIoT devices. The novelty of WASP is two fold. First, it combines offline profiling and light-weight online control to select the most appropriate PM tuning knobs for the given DNN models. Second, it is well tailored to a reconfigurable voltage regulation module that can make the best use of the limited power budget. Our results show that WASP allows AIoT devices to accomplish 65.6% more inference tasks under a stringent power budget without any performance degradation compared with other existing approaches.

Multi-modal computing (M2C) has recently exhibited impressive accuracy improvements in numerous autonomous artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) systems. However, this accuracy gain is often tethered to an incredible increase in energy consumption. Particularly, various highly-developed modality sensors devour most of the energy budget, which would make the deployment of M2C for real-world AIoT applications a difficult challenge.