Joint Quantization and Dynamic Partitioning for Context-Aware Edge Vision Transformers

Zhu Jiaqi, Jain Prakriti, Katare Dewant, Kumar Saurabh

Deploying vision transformer models across connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) requires joint management of computation and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication. Static split-inference methods use fixed partition points and cannot adapt to time-varying link bandwidth, processing load, and concurrent multi-stream traffic. This paper proposes an edge orchestration framework that jointly selects model partition points, per-layer quantization bitwidths, and execution placement across heterogeneous vehicular compute nodes. The joint partitioning and mixed-precision allocation problem is formulated as a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) that minimizes compute and communication energy subject to end-to-end latency and task-quality constraints. The framework is evaluated on Jetson Orin Nano (8~GB), Jetson Orin NX (16~GB), and Jetson AGX Orin (32~GB) nodes using OPV2V-driven multi-stream workloads with $K \in \{2,4,6,8\}$. Across the evaluated configurations, the proposed formulation reduces V2V communication energy by $33.3$--$36.0\%$ relative to a Uniform INT8 split. At $K=8$, end-to-end task completion latency is reduced by $34.0\%$ on the Orin Nano and $33.1\%$ on the Orin NX…