Fast Multimodal Edge Inference via Selective Feature Distillation

Inferring user status at the edge is essential for delivering personalized services, such as detecting emotional states. However, deploying large-scale models directly on user devices is impractical due to substantial computational overhead and the scarcity of labeled data. Conversely, uploading raw data to the cloud for processing raises significant privacy concerns and incurs prohibitive communication costs. To address this challenge, we propose a privacy-preserving multimodal inference framework that leverages large-scale public data while safeguarding sensitive information and optimizing computational efficiency. Specifically, we first train a teacher model in the cloud using publicly available data. Through a feature distillation process, the knowledge from this teacher model is transferred to a lightweight encoder deployed at the user end. This transfer is tailored to the user's data, ensuring that only relevant knowledge is distilled. To accommodate varying communication constraints, we introduce a feature compression mechanism that significantly reduces communication overhead without compromising inference accuracy. Extensive experiments on emotion recognition tasks demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively balances privacy preservation, resource efficiency, and inference accuracy, facilitating seamless collaboration between cloud and edge devices. © 2025 IEEE.