English

Leveraging Kernel Symmetry for Joint Compression and Error Mitigation in Edge Model Transfer

Signal Processing 2026-04-21 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

This paper investigates communication-efficient neural network transmission by exploiting structured symmetry constraints in convolutional kernels. Instead of transmitting all model parameters, we propose a degrees-of-freedom (DoF) based codec that sends only the unique coefficients implied by a chosen symmetry group, enabling deterministic reconstruction of the full weight tensor at the receiver. The proposed framework is evaluated under quantization and noisy channel conditions across multiple symmetry patterns, signal-to-noise ratios, and bit-widths. To improve robustness against transmission impairments, a projection step is further applied at the receiver to enforce consistency with the symmetry-invariant subspace, effectively denoising corrupted parameters. Experimental results on MNIST and CIFAR-10 using a DeepCNN architecture demonstrate that DoF-based transmission achieves substantial bandwidth reduction while preserving significantly higher accuracy than pruning-based baselines, which often suffer catastrophic degradation. Among the tested symmetries, \textit{central-skew symmetry} consistently provides the best accuracy-compression tradeoff, confirming that structured redundancy can be leveraged for reliable and efficient neural model delivery over constrained links.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.17371,
  title  = {Leveraging Kernel Symmetry for Joint Compression and Error Mitigation in Edge Model Transfer},
  author = {Anis Hamadouche and Mathini Sellathurai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.17371},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:16:47.272Z