PRIOT: Pruning-Based Integer-Only Transfer Learning for Embedded Systems

On-device transfer learning is crucial for adapting a common backbone model to the unique environment of each edge device. Tiny microcontrollers, such as the Raspberry Pi Pico, are key targets for on-device learning but often lack floating-point units, necessitating integer-only training. Dynamic computation of quantization scale factors, which is adopted in former studies, incurs high computational costs. Therefore, this letter focuses on integer-only training with static-scale factors, which is challenging with existing training methods. We propose a new training method named PRIOT, which optimizes the network by pruning selected edges rather than updating weights, allowing effective training with static-scale factors. The pruning pattern is determined by the edge-popup algorithm, which trains a parameter named score assigned to each edge instead of the original parameters and prunes the edges with low scores before inference. Additionally, we introduce a memory-efficient variant, PRIOT-S, which only assigns scores to a small fraction of edges. We implement PRIOT and PRIOT-S on the Raspberry Pi Pico and evaluate their accuracy and computational costs using a tiny CNN model on the rotated MNIST dataset and the VGG11 model on the rotated CIFAR-10 dataset. Our results demonstrate that PRIOT improves accuracy by 8.08–33.75 percentage points over existing methods, while PRIOT-S reduces memory footprint with minimal accuracy loss.