Universal embeddings for kernel machine classification

Visual inference over a transmission channel is increasingly becoming an important problem in a variety of applications. In such applications, low latency and bit-rate consumption are often critical performance metrics, making data compression necessary. In this paper, we examine feature compression for support vector machine (SVM)-based inference using quantized randomized embeddings. We demonstrate that embedding the features is equivalent to using the SVM kernel trick with a mapping to a lower dimensional space. Furthermore, we show that universal embeddings-a recently proposed quantized embedding design-approximate a radial basis function (RBF) kernel, commonly used for kernel-based inference. Our experimental results demonstrate that quantized embeddings achieve 50% rate reduction, while maintaining the same inference performance. Moreover, universal embeddings achieve a further reduction in bit-rate over conventional quantized embedding methods, validating the theoretical predictions.