Task-Oriented Communication for Human Action Understanding via Edge-Cloud Co-Inference

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Liu, Jingyi, Yuan, Cheng, He, Lijun, Zhang, Jun, Shao, Jiawei
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866915991912448000
author Liu, Jingyi
Yuan, Cheng
He, Lijun
Zhang, Jun
Shao, Jiawei
author_facet Liu, Jingyi
Yuan, Cheng
He, Lijun
Zhang, Jun
Shao, Jiawei
contents The expanding application of smart sensing has created a growing demand for the accurate understanding of human action at the network edge. Traditional approaches require massive video data to be transmitted from resource-constrained edge devices to powerful cloud servers, incurring prohibitive uplink bandwidth consumption and unacceptable latency while raising privacy concerns. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose a task-oriented communication framework for human action understanding (TOAU) through edge-cloud collaboration. Our framework utilizes a monocular pose estimator to extract continuous joint coordinates from raw videos, followed by a vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) to convert these coordinates into discrete motion tokens. Consequently, only a compact sequence of codebook indices is transmitted over the network, consuming as few as 9 bits per frame and avoiding privacy leakages. At the cloud server, a lightweight projector aligns these motion tokens with the embedding space of a large vision-language model (VLM) to facilitate complex action understanding, which is trained with an efficient instruction tuning paradigm. Comprehensive evaluations on three benchmarks demonstrate that our TOAU system reduces the transmission payload to approximately 1\% and the system latency to around 20\% compared to video codec-based solutions, while delivering comparable action understanding accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07354
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Task-Oriented Communication for Human Action Understanding via Edge-Cloud Co-Inference
Liu, Jingyi
Yuan, Cheng
He, Lijun
Zhang, Jun
Shao, Jiawei
Signal Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The expanding application of smart sensing has created a growing demand for the accurate understanding of human action at the network edge. Traditional approaches require massive video data to be transmitted from resource-constrained edge devices to powerful cloud servers, incurring prohibitive uplink bandwidth consumption and unacceptable latency while raising privacy concerns. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose a task-oriented communication framework for human action understanding (TOAU) through edge-cloud collaboration. Our framework utilizes a monocular pose estimator to extract continuous joint coordinates from raw videos, followed by a vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) to convert these coordinates into discrete motion tokens. Consequently, only a compact sequence of codebook indices is transmitted over the network, consuming as few as 9 bits per frame and avoiding privacy leakages. At the cloud server, a lightweight projector aligns these motion tokens with the embedding space of a large vision-language model (VLM) to facilitate complex action understanding, which is trained with an efficient instruction tuning paradigm. Comprehensive evaluations on three benchmarks demonstrate that our TOAU system reduces the transmission payload to approximately 1\% and the system latency to around 20\% compared to video codec-based solutions, while delivering comparable action understanding accuracy.
title Task-Oriented Communication for Human Action Understanding via Edge-Cloud Co-Inference
topic Signal Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07354