Polymorph: Energy-Efficient Multi-Label Classification for Video Streams on Embedded Devices

Real-time multi-label video classification on embedded devices is constrained by limited compute and energy budgets. Yet, video streams exhibit structural properties such as label sparsity, temporal continuity, and label co-occurrence that can be leveraged for more efficient inference. We introduce Polymorph, a context-aware framework that activates a minimal set of lightweight Low Rank Adapters (LoRA) per frame. Each adapter specializes in a subset of classes derived from co-occurrence patterns and is implemented as a LoRA weight over a shared backbone. At runtime, Polymorph dynamically selects and composes only the adapters needed to cover the active labels, avoiding fullmodel switching and weight merging. This modular strategy improves scalability while reducing latency, and energy overhead. Polymorph achieves 40% lower energy consumption and improves mAP by 9 points over strong baselines executing the TAO dataset.