EdgeDAE: Acceleration of Diffusion Action Experts for Real-Time Physical AI

EdgeDAE is a heterogeneous FPGA-GPU system that offloads the perception-heavy vision transformer to the GPU while accelerating Diffusion Action Expert (DAE) inference on an FPGA by storing all parameters on-chip in BRAM/URAM, eliminating the repeated DRAM parameter loading of iterative denoising. It co-designs quantization, fixed-point arithmetic, and hardware-efficient random number generation for the FPGA fabric. Compared with an edge GPU baseline, it reduces end-to-end inference latency by 52.5% for Octo-Small and 38.7% for Octo-Base with up to 2.10x higher throughput, and achieves about 17x higher energy efficiency than an RTX 4090.