MEOCI: Model Partitioning and Early-Exit Point Selection Joint Optimization for Collaborative Inference in Vehicular Edge Computing

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely used in Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC), becoming the core technology for most intelligent applications. However, these DNN inference tasks are usually computation-intensive and latency-sensitive. In urban autonomous driving scenarios, when a large number of vehicles offload tasks to roadside units (RSUs), they face the problem of computational overload of edge servers and inference delay beyond tolerable limits. To address these challenges, we propose an edge-vehicle collaborative inference acceleration mechanism, namely Model partitioning and Early-exit point selection joint Optimization for Collaborative Inference (MEOCI). Specifically, we dynamically select the optimal model partitioning points with the constraint of RSU computing resources and vehicle computing capabilities; and according to the accuracy threshold set to choose the appropriate early exit point. The goal is to minimize the average inference delay under the inference accuracy constraint. Therefore, we propose the Adaptive Dual-Pool Dueling Double Deep Q-Network (ADP-D3QN) algorithm, which enhances the exploration strategy and experience replay mechanism of D3QN to implement the proposed optimization mechanism MEOCI. We conduct comprehensive performance evaluations using four DNN models: AlexNet, VGG16, ResNet50, YOLOv10n. Experimental results show the proposed ADP-D3QN algorithm reduces average inference delay by 15.8% for AlexNet and 8.7% for VGG16 compared to Edgent algorithm.