Foundational engineering / Original manuscript & reading guide
AMC-Edge Rev D: Precision adaptation within an explicit operating envelope.
Research setting NASA Developed for NASA
AMC-Edge takes AMC’s adaptive-representation idea into a more constrained setting: inference near telemetry ingress. Rev D limits the proposed first live phase to choosing FP16 or INT8 precision, with explicit timing reserves, transition rules and fallback states.
The question
When can an edge inference system reduce numerical precision without exceeding its timing or detection-error budgets?
A narrower adaptation problem
The original AMC paper allows multiple vector formats and translators. AMC-Edge Phase 1 reduces the online choice to two numerical precisions: 16-bit floating point and 8-bit integer inference. Tiling, feature sets and detector sets remain fixed; translation is reserved for offline verification and replay.
This restriction is the engineering idea: make the adaptation small enough to inspect and govern. A finite-state machine separates boot, baseline, shadow observation, adaptive operation and a degraded safety floor. Transitions occur at window boundaries, retaining the configuration epoch for each window.
The conditions for changing precision
The manuscript specifies advancement counters, drift checks and hazard-class budgets before INT8 can be selected. Out-of-range calibration observations force a return to FP16. Deadline risk can require the degraded state; FP16 alone is not assumed to solve every timing problem.
Signed, versioned configuration packs carry calibration and policy parameters. Double buffering and window-boundary swaps preserve the previous configuration for rollback. Environmental derating, clock quality and duplicate computation are part of the proposed operating envelope.
Read the numbers as requirements
The paper’s Phase 1 table specifies a selector p95 of at most 0.6 ms and an absolute cap of 1.0 ms, together with reserved inference time. These are design requirements, not measurements established by this site. The manuscript also contains illustrative configurations and a phased evaluation plan.
“Flight-Ready” is part of the original title. Providing that manuscript does not establish flight qualification, successful deployment or independent validation of its timing and safety claims. The contribution presented here is the constrained architecture and its explicit acceptance conditions.
| Stage | Purpose | Record or mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| Adaptation | Two precision options | FP16 / INT8; fixed features and tiling |
| Advancement | Earn permission to adapt | Shadow coverage, counters, drift checks and hazard budgets |
| Recovery | Retain an inspectable fallback | Window boundaries, signed packs, epoch lineage and degraded state |
Source document
AMC-Edge Rev D: Flight-Ready Precision Adaptation for Edge Inference in NASA Mission Control Telemetry. Author-supplied engineering manuscript.
The 14-page PDF is unchanged from the author-supplied file; its checksum was recorded on 8 October 2026. This reading guide separates the author’s research history from the manuscript’s methods and claims. No new experimental validation is reported here.