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Nov 6

Cloud-Edge Training Architecture for Sim-to-Real Deep Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a promising approach to solve complex control tasks by learning policies through interactions with the environment. However, the training of DRL policies requires large amounts of training experiences, making it impractical to learn the policy directly on physical systems. Sim-to-real approaches leverage simulations to pretrain DRL policies and then deploy them in the real world. Unfortunately, the direct real-world deployment of pretrained policies usually suffers from performance deterioration due to the different dynamics, known as the reality gap. Recent sim-to-real methods, such as domain randomization and domain adaptation, focus on improving the robustness of the pretrained agents. Nevertheless, the simulation-trained policies often need to be tuned with real-world data to reach optimal performance, which is challenging due to the high cost of real-world samples. This work proposes a distributed cloud-edge architecture to train DRL agents in the real world in real-time. In the architecture, the inference and training are assigned to the edge and cloud, separating the real-time control loop from the computationally expensive training loop. To overcome the reality gap, our architecture exploits sim-to-real transfer strategies to continue the training of simulation-pretrained agents on a physical system. We demonstrate its applicability on a physical inverted-pendulum control system, analyzing critical parameters. The real-world experiments show that our architecture can adapt the pretrained DRL agents to unseen dynamics consistently and efficiently.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 27, 2022

Towards Robust and Efficient Cloud-Edge Elastic Model Adaptation via Selective Entropy Distillation

The conventional deep learning paradigm often involves training a deep model on a server and then deploying the model or its distilled ones to resource-limited edge devices. Usually, the models shall remain fixed once deployed (at least for some period) due to the potential high cost of model adaptation for both the server and edge sides. However, in many real-world scenarios, the test environments may change dynamically (known as distribution shifts), which often results in degraded performance. Thus, one has to adapt the edge models promptly to attain promising performance. Moreover, with the increasing data collected at the edge, this paradigm also fails to further adapt the cloud model for better performance. To address these, we encounter two primary challenges: 1) the edge model has limited computation power and may only support forward propagation; 2) the data transmission budget between cloud and edge devices is limited in latency-sensitive scenarios. In this paper, we establish a Cloud-Edge Elastic Model Adaptation (CEMA) paradigm in which the edge models only need to perform forward propagation and the edge models can be adapted online. In our CEMA, to reduce the communication burden, we devise two criteria to exclude unnecessary samples from uploading to the cloud, i.e., dynamic unreliable and low-informative sample exclusion. Based on the uploaded samples, we update and distribute the affine parameters of normalization layers by distilling from the stronger foundation model to the edge model with a sample replay strategy. Extensive experimental results on ImageNet-C and ImageNet-R verify the effectiveness of our CEMA.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 27, 2024

RefactorCoderQA: Benchmarking LLMs for Multi-Domain Coding Question Solutions in Cloud and Edge Deployment

To optimize the reasoning and problem-solving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose a novel cloud-edge collaborative architecture that enables a structured, multi-agent prompting framework. This framework comprises three specialized components: GuideLLM, a lightweight model deployed at the edge to provide methodological guidance; SolverLLM, a more powerful model hosted in the cloud responsible for generating code solutions; and JudgeLLM, an automated evaluator for assessing solution correctness and quality. To evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of this architecture in realistic settings, we introduce RefactorCoderQA, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate and enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) across multi-domain coding tasks. Motivated by the limitations of existing benchmarks, RefactorCoderQA systematically covers various technical domains, including Software Engineering, Data Science, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing, using authentic coding challenges from Stack Overflow. Extensive experiments reveal that our fine-tuned model, RefactorCoder-MoE, achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming leading open-source and commercial baselines with an overall accuracy of 76.84%. Human evaluations further validate the interpretability, accuracy, and practical relevance of the generated solutions. In addition, we evaluate system-level metrics, such as throughput and latency, to gain deeper insights into the performance characteristics and trade-offs of the proposed architecture.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 12, 2025

CE-CoLLM: Efficient and Adaptive Large Language Models Through Cloud-Edge Collaboration

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in serving end-users with human-like intelligence. However, LLMs demand high computational resources, making it challenging to deploy them to satisfy various performance objectives, such as meeting the resource constraints on edge devices close to end-users or achieving high accuracy with ample resources. In this paper, we introduce CE-CoLLM, a novel cloud-edge collaboration framework that supports efficient and adaptive LLM inference for end-users at the edge with two modes, (1) low-latency edge standalone inference and (2) highly accurate cloud-edge collaborative inference. First, we show that the inherent high communication costs for transmitting LLM contextual information between the edge and cloud dominate the overall latency, making it inefficient and costly to deploy LLMs using cloud-edge collaboration. Second, we propose several critical techniques to address this challenge, including early-exit mechanism, cloud context manager, and quantization in cloud-edge collaboration to enable not only low-latency standalone edge inference but also efficient and adaptive cloud-edge collaborative inference for LLMs. Third, we perform comprehensive experimental analysis, which demonstrates that CE-CoLLM significantly reduces inference time by up to 13.81% and cloud computation costs by up to 84.55% compared to the popular cloud-based LLM deployment, while maintaining comparable model accuracy. The proposed approach effectively shifts the computational load to the edge, reduces the communication overhead, scales efficiently with multiple edge clients, and provides reliable LLM deployment using cloud-edge collaboration.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 5, 2024

OmniForce: On Human-Centered, Large Model Empowered and Cloud-Edge Collaborative AutoML System

Automated machine learning (AutoML) seeks to build ML models with minimal human effort. While considerable research has been conducted in the area of AutoML in general, aiming to take humans out of the loop when building artificial intelligence (AI) applications, scant literature has focused on how AutoML works well in open-environment scenarios such as the process of training and updating large models, industrial supply chains or the industrial metaverse, where people often face open-loop problems during the search process: they must continuously collect data, update data and models, satisfy the requirements of the development and deployment environment, support massive devices, modify evaluation metrics, etc. Addressing the open-environment issue with pure data-driven approaches requires considerable data, computing resources, and effort from dedicated data engineers, making current AutoML systems and platforms inefficient and computationally intractable. Human-computer interaction is a practical and feasible way to tackle the problem of open-environment AI. In this paper, we introduce OmniForce, a human-centered AutoML (HAML) system that yields both human-assisted ML and ML-assisted human techniques, to put an AutoML system into practice and build adaptive AI in open-environment scenarios. Specifically, we present OmniForce in terms of ML version management; pipeline-driven development and deployment collaborations; a flexible search strategy framework; and widely provisioned and crowdsourced application algorithms, including large models. Furthermore, the (large) models constructed by OmniForce can be automatically turned into remote services in a few minutes; this process is dubbed model as a service (MaaS). Experimental results obtained in multiple search spaces and real-world use cases demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of OmniForce.

  • 28 authors
·
Mar 1, 2023

Unleashing MLLMs on the Edge: A Unified Framework for Cross-Modal ReID via Adaptive SVD Distillation

Practical cloud-edge deployment of Cross-Modal Re-identification (CM-ReID) faces challenges due to maintaining a fragmented ecosystem of specialized cloud models for diverse modalities. While Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer strong unification potential, existing approaches fail to adapt them into a single end-to-end backbone and lack effective knowledge distillation strategies for edge deployment. To address these limitations, we propose MLLMEmbed-ReID, a unified framework based on a powerful cloud-edge architecture. First, we adapt a foundational MLLM into a state-of-the-art cloud model. We leverage instruction-based prompting to guide the MLLM in generating a unified embedding space across RGB, infrared, sketch, and text modalities. This model is then trained efficiently with a hierarchical Low-Rank Adaptation finetuning (LoRA-SFT) strategy, optimized under a holistic cross-modal alignment objective. Second, to deploy its knowledge onto an edge-native student, we introduce a novel distillation strategy motivated by the low-rank property in the teacher's feature space. To prioritize essential information, this method employs a Principal Component Mapping loss, while relational structures are preserved via a Feature Relation loss. Our lightweight edge-based model achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple visual CM-ReID benchmarks, while its cloud-based counterpart excels across all CM-ReID benchmarks. The MLLMEmbed-ReID framework thus presents a complete and effective solution for deploying unified MLLM-level intelligence on resource-constrained devices. The code and models will be open-sourced soon.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 13

Leveraging Cloud-Fog Automation for Autonomous Collision Detection and Classification in Intelligent Unmanned Surface Vehicles

Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) technologies are foundational in driving maritime autonomy, particularly for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). However, onboard computational constraints and communication latency significantly restrict real-time data processing, analysis, and predictive modeling, hence limiting the scalability and responsiveness of maritime ICPS. To overcome these challenges, we propose a distributed Cloud-Edge-IoT architecture tailored for maritime ICPS by leveraging design principles from the recently proposed Cloud-Fog Automation paradigm. Our proposed architecture comprises three hierarchical layers: a Cloud Layer for centralized and decentralized data aggregation, advanced analytics, and future model refinement; an Edge Layer that executes localized AI-driven processing and decision-making; and an IoT Layer responsible for low-latency sensor data acquisition. Our experimental results demonstrated improvements in computational efficiency, responsiveness, and scalability. When compared with our conventional approaches, we achieved a classification accuracy of 86\%, with an improved latency performance. By adopting Cloud-Fog Automation, we address the low-latency processing constraints and scalability challenges in maritime ICPS applications. Our work offers a practical, modular, and scalable framework to advance robust autonomy and AI-driven decision-making and autonomy for intelligent USVs in future maritime ICPS.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 22, 2025

CFTel: A Practical Architecture for Robust and Scalable Telerobotics with Cloud-Fog Automation

Telerobotics is a key foundation in autonomous Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS), enabling remote operations across various domains. However, conventional cloud-based telerobotics suffers from latency, reliability, scalability, and resilience issues, hindering real-time performance in critical applications. Cloud-Fog Telerobotics (CFTel) builds on the Cloud-Fog Automation (CFA) paradigm to address these limitations by leveraging a distributed Cloud-Edge-Robotics computing architecture, enabling deterministic connectivity, deterministic connected intelligence, and deterministic networked computing. This paper synthesizes recent advancements in CFTel, aiming to highlight its role in facilitating scalable, low-latency, autonomous, and AI-driven telerobotics. We analyze architectural frameworks and technologies that enable them, including 5G Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication, Edge Intelligence, Embodied AI, and Digital Twins. The study demonstrates that CFTel has the potential to enhance real-time control, scalability, and autonomy while supporting service-oriented solutions. We also discuss practical challenges, including latency constraints, cybersecurity risks, interoperability issues, and standardization efforts. This work serves as a foundational reference for researchers, stakeholders, and industry practitioners in future telerobotics research.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 22, 2025

RLinf-USER: A Unified and Extensible System for Real-World Online Policy Learning in Embodied AI

Online policy learning directly in the physical world is a promising yet challenging direction for embodied intelligence. Unlike simulation, real-world systems cannot be arbitrarily accelerated, cheaply reset, or massively replicated, which makes scalable data collection, heterogeneous deployment, and long-horizon effective training difficult. These challenges suggest that real-world policy learning is not only an algorithmic issue but fundamentally a systems problem. We present USER, a Unified and extensible SystEm for Real-world online policy learning. USER treats physical robots as first-class hardware resources alongside GPUs through a unified hardware abstraction layer, enabling automatic discovery, management, and scheduling of heterogeneous robots. To address cloud-edge communication, USER introduces an adaptive communication plane with tunneling-based networking, distributed data channels for traffic localization, and streaming-multiprocessor-aware weight synchronization to regulate GPU-side overhead. On top of this infrastructure, USER organizes learning as a fully asynchronous framework with a persistent, cache-aware buffer, enabling efficient long-horizon experiments with robust crash recovery and reuse of historical data. In addition, USER provides extensible abstractions for rewards, algorithms, and policies, supporting online imitation or reinforcement learning of CNN/MLP, generative policies, and large vision-language-action (VLA) models within a unified pipeline. Results in both simulation and the real world show that USER enables multi-robot coordination, heterogeneous manipulators, edge-cloud collaboration with large models, and long-running asynchronous training, offering a unified and extensible systems foundation for real-world online policy learning.

RLinf RLinf
·
Feb 8 2

AoE: Always-on Egocentric Human Video Collection for Embodied AI

Embodied foundation models require large-scale, high-quality real-world interaction data for pre-training and scaling. However, existing data collection methods suffer from high infrastructure costs, complex hardware dependencies, and limited interaction scope, making scalable expansion challenging. In fact, humans themselves are ideal physically embodied agents. Therefore, obtaining egocentric real-world interaction data from globally distributed "human agents" offers advantages of low cost and sustainability. To this end, we propose the Always-on Egocentric (AoE) data collection system, which aims to simplify hardware dependencies by leveraging humans themselves and their smartphones, enabling low-cost, highly efficient, and scene-agnostic real-world interaction data collection to address the challenge of data scarcity. Specifically, we first employ an ergonomic neck-mounted smartphone holder to enable low-barrier, large-scale egocentric data collection through a cloud-edge collaborative architecture. Second, we develop a cross-platform mobile APP that leverages on-device compute for real-time processing, while the cloud hosts automated labeling and filtering pipelines that transform raw videos into high-quality training data. Finally, the AoE system supports distributed Ego video data collection by anyone, anytime, and anywhere. We evaluate AoE on data preprocessing quality and downstream tasks, demonstrating that high-quality egocentric data significantly boosts real-world generalization.

  • 18 authors
·
Mar 1

Mobile-Agent-v3.5: Multi-platform Fundamental GUI Agents

The paper introduces GUI-Owl-1.5, the latest native GUI agent model that features instruct/thinking variants in multiple sizes (2B/4B/8B/32B/235B) and supports a range of platforms (desktop, mobile, browser, and more) to enable cloud-edge collaboration and real-time interaction. GUI-Owl-1.5 achieves state-of-the-art results on more than 20+ GUI benchmarks on open-source models: (1) on GUI automation tasks, it obtains 56.5 on OSWorld, 71.6 on AndroidWorld, and 48.4 on WebArena; (2) on grounding tasks, it obtains 80.3 on ScreenSpotPro; (3) on tool-calling tasks, it obtains 47.6 on OSWorld-MCP, and 46.8 on MobileWorld; (4) on memory and knowledge tasks, it obtains 75.5 on GUI-Knowledge Bench. GUI-Owl-1.5 incorporates several key innovations: (1) Hybird Data Flywheel: we construct the data pipeline for UI understanding and trajectory generation based on a combination of simulated environments and cloud-based sandbox environments, in order to improve the efficiency and quality of data collection. (2) Unified Enhancement of Agent Capabilities: we use a unified thought-synthesis pipeline to enhance the model's reasoning capabilities, while placing particular emphasis on improving key agent abilities, including Tool/MCP use, memory and multi-agent adaptation; (3) Multi-platform Environment RL Scaling: We propose a new environment RL algorithm, MRPO, to address the challenges of multi-platform conflicts and the low training efficiency of long-horizon tasks. The GUI-Owl-1.5 models are open-sourced, and an online cloud-sandbox demo is available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/MobileAgent.

AlibabaTongyiLab TongyiLab
·
Feb 14 3

Empowering Edge Agents: A Systematic Analysis of Edge-Cloud Collaboration in LLM Agent Execution

Edge-cloud collaboration combines the lower inference overhead and greater data locality of edge-side execution with the stronger capabilities of cloud-hosted models. However, as LLM agents increasingly operate in long-horizon scenarios, cloud participation becomes interleaved throughout execution rather than a one-shot decision for each query. Such interleaved participation introduces trajectory-level effects that remain insufficiently understood. To address this gap, we introduce EC2-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating edge-cloud collaboration in long-horizon agent execution. It provides executable digital-workspace agent tasks and a unified evaluation framework covering task performance, resource usage, and privacy exposure. Using this benchmark, we empirically study diverse forms of edge-cloud collaboration. Our study reveals three findings. First, collaboration achieves a favorable balance among task performance, resource usage, and privacy exposure compared with edge-only and cloud-only execution. Second, as edge models become stronger, collaborative execution approaches cloud-only performance, and performance differences across strategies shrink, while privacy exposure remains strongly strategy-dependent. Third, stronger edge capability shifts preferred collaboration from externally controlled cloud participation and direct cloud execution toward more edge-controlled collaboration. Further analyses identify cloud-invocation decision-making and instruction following as important edge-side abilities for effective collaboration. These findings provide a systematic understanding of edge-cloud collaboration in long-horizon agent execution and insights for designing future edge agents that effectively collaborate with cloud models. Code and resources are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/EC2-Bench.

Semantic Edge-Cloud Communication for Real-Time Urban Traffic Surveillance with ViT and LLMs over Mobile Networks

Real-time urban traffic surveillance is vital for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) to ensure road safety, optimize traffic flow, track vehicle trajectories, and prevent collisions in smart cities. Deploying edge cameras across urban environments is a standard practice for monitoring road conditions. However, integrating these with intelligent models requires a robust understanding of dynamic traffic scenarios and a responsive interface for user interaction. Although multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) can interpret traffic images and generate informative responses, their deployment on edge devices is infeasible due to high computational demands. Therefore, LLM inference must occur on the cloud, necessitating visual data transmission from edge to cloud, a process hindered by limited bandwidth, leading to potential delays that compromise real-time performance. To address this challenge, we propose a semantic communication framework that significantly reduces transmission overhead. Our method involves detecting Regions of Interest (RoIs) using YOLOv11, cropping relevant image segments, and converting them into compact embedding vectors using a Vision Transformer (ViT). These embeddings are then transmitted to the cloud, where an image decoder reconstructs the cropped images. The reconstructed images are processed by a multimodal LLM to generate traffic condition descriptions. This approach achieves a 99.9% reduction in data transmission size while maintaining an LLM response accuracy of 89% for reconstructed cropped images, compared to 93% accuracy with original cropped images. Our results demonstrate the efficiency and practicality of ViT and LLM-assisted edge-cloud semantic communication for real-time traffic surveillance.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 25, 2025

FlexSpec: Frozen Drafts Meet Evolving Targets in Edge-Cloud Collaborative LLM Speculative Decoding

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in mobile and edge computing environments is constrained by limited on-device resources, scarce wireless bandwidth, and frequent model evolution. Although edge-cloud collaborative inference with speculative decoding (SD) can reduce end-to-end latency by executing a lightweight draft model at the edge and verifying it with a cloud-side target model, existing frameworks fundamentally rely on tight coupling between the two models. Consequently, repeated model synchronization introduces excessive communication overhead, increasing end-to-end latency, and ultimately limiting the scalability of SD in edge environments. To address these limitations, we propose FlexSpec, a communication-efficient collaborative inference framework tailored for evolving edge-cloud systems. The core design of FlexSpec is a shared-backbone architecture that allows a single and static edge-side draft model to remain compatible with a large family of evolving cloud-side target models. By decoupling edge deployment from cloud-side model updates, FlexSpec eliminates the need for edge-side retraining or repeated model downloads, substantially reducing communication and maintenance costs. Furthermore, to accommodate time-varying wireless conditions and heterogeneous device constraints, we develop a channel-aware adaptive speculation mechanism that dynamically adjusts the speculative draft length based on real-time channel state information and device energy budgets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlexSpec achieves superior performance compared to conventional SD approaches in terms of inference efficiency.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 1

Where Should Agents Live? Energy-Memory Characterization of Agentic AI for the Edge-Cloud Continuum

As telecommunication networks evolve toward autonomous 5G-Advanced and 6G operations, agentic artificial intelligence (AI) workflows, where large language models (LLMs) execute multi-step reasoning, invoke diagnostic tools, retrieve domain knowledge, and coordinate across agent teams, are increasingly embedded across the edge-cloud continuum. While the biological brain accomplishes complex cognition on an exceptionally modest metabolic power budget of approximately 20W contemporary LLMs are profoundly energy- and memory-intensive, making sustainable lifecycle orchestration a critical operational priority. However, existing AI lifecycle metrics evaluate only isolated, single-model inferences or overlook multi-agent execution graphs entirely. Consequently, network operators lack foundational models to determine whether distributed agent communication incurs meaningful energy costs and where across edge-cloud tiers agent teams should physically reside. To address this gap, we introduce agentic-eCAL, generalizing the Energy Cost of AI Lifecycle (eCAL) metric to directed multi-agent workflows by coupling a closed-form two-rate single-call energy model (compute-bound prefill and memory-bound decode) with 7-layer OSI data transport. Grounded in hundreds of GPU benchmark configurations on NVIDIA A100 and H100, 16 open-weight models and 8 orchestration topologies, we validate components of the metric and study workflow placement implications. Our findings demonstrate that inter-agent text transport incurs 0.25% of workflow energy across 5G RAN, metro, and optical links. Therefore in edge-cloud agent placement the dominant energy cost of distribution is often not the transmission of inter-agent text itself, but the additional inference and context processing induced by that communication.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 15 1

Bandwidth-Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Edge-Cloud Many-to-Many Speech Translation

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for speech-to-text translation (S2TT). However, existing deployment paradigms face critical challenges: pure on-device models suffer from resource constraints, while centralized cloud systems incur severe privacy risks and bandwidth bottlenecks by transmitting raw voice data. Furthermore, most models exhibit English-centric biases, restricting many-to-many translation scaling. In this paper, we propose Edge-cloud Speech Recognition and Translation (ESRT), a privacy-preserving and bandwidth-efficient collaborative edge-cloud MLLM framework. Specifically, we design an edge-cloud split inference architecture that retains a lightweight speech encoder and adapter on the device, transmitting only highly compressed intermediate features to the cloud. This fundamentally prevents voiceprint leakage and reduces bandwidth requirements by up to 10times. To overcome English-centric bottlenecks, we introduce a multi-task weighted curriculum learning strategy with data balancing to ensure robust cross-lingual consistency. Extensive experiments on the FLEURS dataset demonstrate that our models, ESRT-4B and ESRT-12B, achieve state-of-the-art many-to-many S2TT performance across 45 languages (45 times 44 directions). Code and models are released to facilitate reproducible, privacy-aware MLLM S2TT research. The code and models are released at https://github.com/yxduir/esrt.

  • 7 authors
·
May 26

EdgeWise: Bringing Long-Horizon Agents to the Edge via Selective Cloud Delegation

Complex and long-horizon agent tasks often rely on frontier models deployed in the cloud to achieve strong performance. However, using these models for every step of a long-horizon trajectory incurs substantial inference cost, even though not all steps may require the same level of model capability. In this paper, we find that allocating the LLM to only a small subset of key steps can achieve performance comparable to full LLM execution while significantly reducing inference cost. Motivated by this observation, we propose EdgeWise, an edge-cloud collaboration framework that deploys an SLM on the local device as the primary solver and selectively delegates critical steps to a cloud LLM when stronger model capacity is needed. To enable autonomous delegation without additional models at inference time, we introduce a step-level RL method that jointly optimizes task solving and delegation, with fine-grained credit assignment for individual delegation decisions. We also introduce an external judge-based delegation strategy and use it to systematically investigate key design choices in edge-cloud collaboration, including when to delegate, how delegation decisions should be made, what context should be shared, and how frequently the cloud LLM should be invoked. Experiments show that EdgeWise matches or outperforms pure-LLM execution while reducing inference cost up to 62% on SWE-Rebench and 34% on Terminal-Bench 2.1. We further deploy EdgeWise on a local workstation, demonstrating comparable cost savings in a practical edge-cloud setting.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Oct 12 2

MemPrivacy: Privacy-Preserving Personalized Memory Management for Edge-Cloud Agents

As LLM-powered agents are increasingly deployed in edge-cloud environments, personalized memory has become a key enabler of long-term adaptation and user-centric interaction. However, cloud-assisted memory management exposes sensitive user information, while existing privacy protection methods typically rely on aggressive masking that removes task-relevant semantics and consequently degrades memory utility and personalization quality. To address this challenge, We propose MemPrivacy, which identifies privacy-sensitive spans on edge devices, replaces them with semantically structured type-aware placeholders for cloud-side memory processing, and restores the original values locally when needed. By decoupling privacy protection from semantic destruction, MemPrivacy minimizes sensitive data exposure while retaining the information required for effective memory formation and retrieval. We also construct MemPrivacy-Bench for systematic evaluation, a dataset covering 200 users and over 52k privacy instances, and introduce a four-level privacy taxonomy for configurable protection policies. Experiments show that MemPrivacy achieves strong performance in privacy information extraction, substantially surpassing strong general-purpose models such as GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3.1-Pro, while also reducing inference latency. Across multiple widely used memory systems, MemPrivacy limits utility loss to within 1.6%, outperforming baseline masking strategies. Overall, MemPrivacy offers an effective balance between privacy protection and personalized memory utility for edge-cloud agents, enabling secure, practical, and user-transparent deployment.

MemTensor MemTensor
·
May 9 4

Sol-H3: Recursive Self-Improvement for MiniMax-H3 Inference Acceleration on Sol-Engine across Cloud and Edge

Video diffusion models are rapidly scaling and exhibiting enhanced generation capabilities. Among these recent advancements, MiniMax-H3 stands out as a highly capable, production-level open-source model. However, its 33-billion parameters and multi-step iterative denoising process introduce substantial computational overhead. Consequently, their practical production is hindered by generation latency in the cloud deployment like NVIDIA-GB200, alongside strict memory limits that pose further challenges at the edge device like DGX-Spark. To address these diverse hardware bottlenecks from cloud to edge device, we present a full-stack inference pipeline that integrates efficient algorithmic design with optimized operator implementations. Algorithmically, we introduce a cross-resolution two-stage generation scheduler that exploits the step-wise nature of diffusion: early low-resolution steps rapidly establish the global layout, while later high-resolution steps focus refinements of local and perceptual details. These stages are connected by a learned latent-to-latent mapping module, completely eliminating the computationally expensive VAE decode-reencode cycle for resolution transferring cross different resolutions. For operator implementation, we deploy a Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) loop that searches kernel fusions and memory layouts, evaluating latency together with numerical agreement. Together, these optimizations deliver up to 30x end-to-end speedup and 20% lower memory: a 5-second 1344x768 video with audio is generated 3.5x faster than real time on an 8xGB200 node, and in under a minute fully memory-resident on a single DGX Spark.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 27

TPI-LLM: Serving 70B-scale LLMs Efficiently on Low-resource Edge Devices

Large model inference is shifting from cloud to edge due to concerns about the privacy of user interaction data. However, edge devices often struggle with limited computing power, memory, and bandwidth, requiring collaboration across multiple devices to run and speed up LLM inference. Pipeline parallelism, the mainstream solution, is inefficient for single-user scenarios, while tensor parallelism struggles with frequent communications. In this paper, we argue that tensor parallelism can be more effective than pipeline on low-resource devices, and present a compute- and memory-efficient tensor parallel inference system, named TPI-LLM, to serve 70B-scale models. TPI-LLM keeps sensitive raw data local in the users' devices and introduces a sliding window memory scheduler to dynamically manage layer weights during inference, with disk I/O latency overlapped with the computation and communication. This allows larger models to run smoothly on memory-limited devices. We analyze the communication bottleneck and find that link latency, not bandwidth, emerges as the main issue, so a star-based allreduce algorithm is implemented. Through extensive experiments on both emulated and real testbeds, TPI-LLM demonstrated over 80% less time-to-first-token and token latency compared to Accelerate, and over 90% compared to Transformers and Galaxy, while cutting the peak memory footprint of Llama 2-70B by 90%, requiring only 3.1 GB of memory for 70B-scale models.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 1, 2024 8

A Converting Autoencoder Toward Low-latency and Energy-efficient DNN Inference at the Edge

Reducing inference time and energy usage while maintaining prediction accuracy has become a significant concern for deep neural networks (DNN) inference on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach based on "converting" autoencoder and lightweight DNNs. This improves upon recent work such as early-exiting framework and DNN partitioning. Early-exiting frameworks spend different amounts of computation power for different input data depending upon their complexity. However, they can be inefficient in real-world scenarios that deal with many hard image samples. On the other hand, DNN partitioning algorithms that utilize the computation power of both the cloud and edge devices can be affected by network delays and intermittent connections between the cloud and the edge. We present CBNet, a low-latency and energy-efficient DNN inference framework tailored for edge devices. It utilizes a "converting" autoencoder to efficiently transform hard images into easy ones, which are subsequently processed by a lightweight DNN for inference. To the best of our knowledge, such autoencoder has not been proposed earlier. Our experimental results using three popular image-classification datasets on a Raspberry Pi 4, a Google Cloud instance, and an instance with Nvidia Tesla K80 GPU show that CBNet achieves up to 4.8x speedup in inference latency and 79% reduction in energy usage compared to competing techniques while maintaining similar or higher accuracy.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 11, 2024

From Acoustic Sensing to Physical Actions: A Comprehensive Survey of Security Risks in Edge-Deployed Audio LLM-Based Agents

Audio Large Language Models (Audio LLMs) are embedded in agents for smart homes, vehicles, wearables, and embodied systems, where acoustic inputs can propagate from perception into persistent state and consequential execution. This setting extends security analysis beyond model behavior to the system conditions that determine how acoustic inputs can influence agent behavior and external actions. Existing surveys examine acoustic security, LLM-based agents, and edge deployment in isolation, leaving their security interactions in deployed Audio LLM-based agents insufficiently characterized. This survey introduces an Acoustic Sensing-to-Action (S2A) system model that traces these security implications along the path from acoustic sensing to external execution, while accounting for edge-cloud runtime and lifecycle transformation. We use the model to synthesize attacks, defenses, and evaluation methods across the acoustic, agent, and edge-system literature. The synthesis shows that security gaps can emerge within components and at the transitions between stages, where protections developed for one stage do not necessarily provide end-to-end assurance in the deployed system. These findings motivate security evaluation that follows acoustic influence from sensing to action across persistent state, system boundaries, and changing deployment conditions in real-world agents.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 10

Trajectory-Level Speculation with Semantic Verification for Tool-Using Agents

Large language model agents solve tasks through long sequences of tool calls, and the prevailing design has a single strong model generate every step, although many steps are routine enough for a much smaller model. Existing ways of sharing this work keep the strong model as the generator: routers and collaborative agents decide which model handles each query or step, and speculative methods check a small model's drafts one step at a time, usually against the strong model's own action. We introduce SpecAgent, a collaboration protocol that turns the strong model from the author of each step into a reviewer of steps drafted by a weak model. The weak model executes read-only tool calls as it drafts, so that every step is grounded in real observations, and holds the first action that would modify the environment. The strong model then verifies the drafted segment in a single prefill pass, commits the longest prefix it judges semantically valid, and repairs the first rejected step. Because verification replaces autoregressive decoding with parallel prefill, the strong model decodes only short verdicts and occasional repairs rather than every step. On τ^2-Bench, SpecAgent comes within one point of the strong model's success rate while roughly halving memory traffic and wall time, and on AutomationBench and VitaBench it recovers 44-75% of the quality gap while lowering both. In an edge-cloud deployment on MCP-Atlas with three cloud models, it closes 53-75% of the weak-strong quality gap while the strong model generates at most half as many tokens. These results suggest that a strong model need not author every step of an agent: reviewing grounded drafts retains most of its quality while cutting both latency and memory traffic.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 14 2

On-Device Language Models: A Comprehensive Review

The advent of large language models (LLMs) revolutionized natural language processing applications, and running LLMs on edge devices has become increasingly attractive for reasons including reduced latency, data localization, and personalized user experiences. This comprehensive review examines the challenges of deploying computationally expensive LLMs on resource-constrained devices and explores innovative solutions across multiple domains. The paper investigates the development of on-device language models, their efficient architectures, including parameter sharing and modular designs, as well as state-of-the-art compression techniques like quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation. Hardware acceleration strategies and collaborative edge-cloud deployment approaches are analyzed, highlighting the intricate balance between performance and resource utilization. Case studies of on-device language models from major mobile manufacturers demonstrate real-world applications and potential benefits. The review also addresses critical aspects such as adaptive learning, multi-modal capabilities, and personalization. By identifying key research directions and open challenges, this paper provides a roadmap for future advancements in on-device language models, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary efforts to realize the full potential of ubiquitous, intelligent computing while ensuring responsible and ethical deployment. For a comprehensive review of research work and educational resources on on-device large language models (LLMs), please visit https://github.com/NexaAI/Awesome-LLMs-on-device. To download and run on-device LLMs, visit https://www.nexaai.com/models.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 25, 2024

AI Flow: Perspectives, Scenarios, and Approaches

Pioneered by the foundational information theory by Claude Shannon and the visionary framework of machine intelligence by Alan Turing, the convergent evolution of information and communication technologies (IT/CT) has created an unbroken wave of connectivity and computation. This synergy has sparked a technological revolution, now reaching its peak with large artificial intelligence (AI) models that are reshaping industries and redefining human-machine collaboration. However, the realization of ubiquitous intelligence faces considerable challenges due to substantial resource consumption in large models and high communication bandwidth demands. To address these challenges, AI Flow has been introduced as a multidisciplinary framework that integrates cutting-edge IT and CT advancements, with a particular emphasis on the following three key points. First, device-edge-cloud framework serves as the foundation, which integrates end devices, edge servers, and cloud clusters to optimize scalability and efficiency for low-latency model inference. Second, we introduce the concept of familial models, which refers to a series of different-sized models with aligned hidden features, enabling effective collaboration and the flexibility to adapt to varying resource constraints and dynamic scenarios. Third, connectivity- and interaction-based intelligence emergence is a novel paradigm of AI Flow. By leveraging communication networks to enhance connectivity, the collaboration among AI models across heterogeneous nodes achieves emergent intelligence that surpasses the capability of any single model. The innovations of AI Flow provide enhanced intelligence, timely responsiveness, and ubiquitous accessibility to AI services, paving the way for the tighter fusion of AI techniques and communication systems.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 14, 2025

RoboOS: A Hierarchical Embodied Framework for Cross-Embodiment and Multi-Agent Collaboration

The dawn of embodied intelligence has ushered in an unprecedented imperative for resilient, cognition-enabled multi-agent collaboration across next-generation ecosystems, revolutionizing paradigms in autonomous manufacturing, adaptive service robotics, and cyber-physical production architectures. However, current robotic systems face significant limitations, such as limited cross-embodiment adaptability, inefficient task scheduling, and insufficient dynamic error correction. While End-to-end VLA models demonstrate inadequate long-horizon planning and task generalization, hierarchical VLA models suffer from a lack of cross-embodiment and multi-agent coordination capabilities. To address these challenges, we introduce RoboOS, the first open-source embodied system built on a Brain-Cerebellum hierarchical architecture, enabling a paradigm shift from single-agent to multi-agent intelligence. Specifically, RoboOS consists of three key components: (1) Embodied Brain Model (RoboBrain), a MLLM designed for global perception and high-level decision-making; (2) Cerebellum Skill Library, a modular, plug-and-play toolkit that facilitates seamless execution of multiple skills; and (3) Real-Time Shared Memory, a spatiotemporal synchronization mechanism for coordinating multi-agent states. By integrating hierarchical information flow, RoboOS bridges Embodied Brain and Cerebellum Skill Library, facilitating robust planning, scheduling, and error correction for long-horizon tasks, while ensuring efficient multi-agent collaboration through Real-Time Shared Memory. Furthermore, we enhance edge-cloud communication and cloud-based distributed inference to facilitate high-frequency interactions and enable scalable deployment. Extensive real-world experiments across various scenarios, demonstrate RoboOS's versatility in supporting heterogeneous embodiments. Project website: https://github.com/FlagOpen/RoboOS

  • 8 authors
·
May 6, 2025

Quamba: A Post-Training Quantization Recipe for Selective State Space Models

State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an appealing alternative to Transformers for large language models, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy with constant memory complexity which allows for holding longer context lengths than attention-based networks. The superior computational efficiency of SSMs in long sequence modeling positions them favorably over Transformers in many scenarios. However, improving the efficiency of SSMs on request-intensive cloud-serving and resource-limited edge applications is still a formidable task. SSM quantization is a possible solution to this problem, making SSMs more suitable for wide deployment, while still maintaining their accuracy. Quantization is a common technique to reduce the model size and to utilize the low bit-width acceleration features on modern computing units, yet existing quantization techniques are poorly suited for SSMs. Most notably, SSMs have highly sensitive feature maps within the selective scan mechanism (i.e., linear recurrence) and massive outliers in the output activations which are not present in the output of token-mixing in the self-attention modules. To address this issue, we propose a static 8-bit per-tensor SSM quantization method which suppresses the maximum values of the input activations to the selective SSM for finer quantization precision and quantizes the output activations in an outlier-free space with Hadamard transform. Our 8-bit weight-activation quantized Mamba 2.8B SSM benefits from hardware acceleration and achieves a 1.72x lower generation latency on an Nvidia Orin Nano 8G, with only a 0.9% drop in average accuracy on zero-shot tasks. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and practical applicability of our approach for deploying SSM-based models of all sizes on both cloud and edge platforms.

Quantization Undoes Alignment: Bias Emergence in Compressed LLMs Across Models and Precision Levels

Large Language Models are routinely compressed via post-training quantization to reduce inference costs and memory footprint for cloud and edge deployment, yet the impact of this compression on model quality remains poorly understood. Existing studies typically compare only two conditions (full-precision vs. a single quantized variant), rely on aggregate bias metrics, and evaluate a single model family, making it impossible to distinguish gradual degradation from threshold-dependent safety failures. We conduct a controlled empirical study of three instruction-tuned models (Qwen2.5-7B, Mistral-7B, Phi-3.5-mini) at five precision levels (BF16 through 3-bit) on 12,148 BBQ bias benchmark items across 5 random seeds, totaling 911,100 inference records. Our results reveal that 3-bit quantization causes 6-21% of previously unbiased items to develop new stereotypical behaviors, following a clear dose-response pattern confirmed via logistic regression, while models' willingness to select "unknown" answers declines by 17.4%. Crucially, these item-level changes are invisible to standard quality metrics: perplexity increases by less than 0.5% at 8-bit and under 3% at 4-bit across all three models, yet 2.5-5.6% of items already develop new biases at 4-bit. These findings demonstrate that aggregate evaluation metrics systematically miss fairness-critical degradation, underscoring the need for quality-aware compression protocols that explicitly test for bias emergence before deployment.

  • 2 authors
·
May 1

SpeContext: Enabling Efficient Long-context Reasoning with Speculative Context Sparsity in LLMs

In this paper, we point out that the objective of the retrieval algorithms is to align with the LLM, which is similar to the objective of knowledge distillation in LLMs. We analyze the similarity in information focus between the distilled language model(DLM) and the original LLM from the perspective of information theory, and thus propose a novel paradigm that leverages a DLM as the retrieval algorithm. Based on the insight, we present SpeContext, an algorithm and system co-design for long-context reasoning. (1) At the algorithm level, SpeContext proposes lightweight retrieval head based on the head-level attention weights of DLM, achieving > 90% parameters reduction by pruning the redundancy. (2) At the system level, SpeContext designs an asynchronous prefetch dataflow via the elastic loading strategy, effectively overlapping KV cache retrieval with the LLM computation. (3) At the compilation level, SpeContext constructs the theoretical memory model and implements an adaptive memory management system to achieve acceleration by maximizing GPU memory utilization. We deploy and evaluate SpeContext in two resourceconstrained environments, cloud and edge. Extensive experiments show that, compared with the Huggingface framework, SpeContext achieves up to 24.89x throughput improvement in cloud and 10.06x speedup in edge with negligible accuracy loss, pushing the Pareto frontier of accuracy and throughput.

Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Advancing Big Data Analytics and Management

Advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning have catalyzed the transformation of big data analytics and management into pivotal domains for research and application. This work explores the theoretical foundations, methodological advancements, and practical implementations of these technologies, emphasizing their role in uncovering actionable insights from massive, high-dimensional datasets. The study presents a systematic overview of data preprocessing techniques, including data cleaning, normalization, integration, and dimensionality reduction, to prepare raw data for analysis. Core analytics methodologies such as classification, clustering, regression, and anomaly detection are examined, with a focus on algorithmic innovation and scalability. Furthermore, the text delves into state-of-the-art frameworks for data mining and predictive modeling, highlighting the role of neural networks, support vector machines, and ensemble methods in tackling complex analytical challenges. Special emphasis is placed on the convergence of big data with distributed computing paradigms, including cloud and edge computing, to address challenges in storage, computation, and real-time analytics. The integration of ethical considerations, including data privacy and compliance with global standards, ensures a holistic perspective on data management. Practical applications across healthcare, finance, marketing, and policy-making illustrate the real-world impact of these technologies. Through comprehensive case studies and Python-based implementations, this work equips researchers, practitioners, and data enthusiasts with the tools to navigate the complexities of modern data analytics. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, fostering the development of innovative solutions for managing and leveraging data in the era of artificial intelligence.

  • 26 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024

AccLLM: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference Via Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved huge success in the natural language processing (NLP) field, driving a growing demand to extend their deployment from the cloud to edge devices. However, deploying LLMs on resource-constrained edge devices poses significant challenges, including (1) intensive computations and huge model sizes, (2) great memory and bandwidth demands introduced by the autoregressive generation process, and (3) limited scalability for handling long sequences. To address these challenges, we propose AccLLM, a comprehensive acceleration framework that enables efficient and fast long-context LLM inference through algorithm and hardware co-design. At the algorithmic level, we integrate (1) pruning, (2) {\Lambda}-shaped attention, and (3) an innovative W2A8KV4 (2-bit weights, 8-bit activations, and 4-bit KV cache) quantization scheme, thus effectively reducing memory and bandwidth requirements while facilitating LLMs' long-sequence generation. At the hardware level, we design a dedicated FPGA-based accelerator with a reconfigurable computing engine to effectively and flexibly accommodate diverse operations arising from our compression algorithm, thereby fully translating the algorithmic innovations into tangible hardware efficiency. We validate AccLLM on the Xilinx Alveo U280 FPGA, demonstrating a 4.07x energy efficiency and a 2.98x throughput compared to the state-of-the-art work FlightLLM.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 6, 2025

DREAM Technical Report

Industrial recommender systems commonly use cascaded retrieval, ranking, and re-ranking pipelines. Although efficient, these pipelines fragment information and objectives across modules, rely on rigid rules, and have limited awareness of real-time intent, leaving session-level shifts among browsing, comparison, and purchase insufficiently addressed. We present DREAM (Developing Recommender Engine with Agentic Methods), an autonomous optimization control architecture that adds a perception-aware, orchestrable, and auditable policy layer atop existing pipelines without replacing them. DREAM has two core components. First, a three-tier Intent Engine fuses on-device signals into structured L0/L1/L2 intent representations; its edge-cloud trigger chain reduces reporting volume to approximately 8.7%. Second, a Meta Engine uses a MetaModel for layered M1-to-M2-to-M3 reasoning: intent summarization, strategy planning informed by Strategy Memory, and parameter translation. It dispatches the resulting parameters through a unified outlet with safety guardrails. A Reward Dual Loop continuously optimizes both components by combining offline simulation for strategy-space exploration with online feedback for outcome calibration, forming a cycle of generation, execution, evaluation, and experience accumulation. Large-scale A/B tests on Taobao's homepage feed show that re-ranking control alone improves IPV by 2.06%, Core IPV by 2.39%, and GMV by 0.88%. Extending control to fine ranking raises these gains to 2.71%, 3.06%, and 1.31%, respectively, while consistently improving PV by more than 1%. These gains require neither replacement of pipeline models nor compromise of serving stability, supporting agentic meta-control as a viable paradigm for industrial recommendation.

alibabagroup alibaba
·
Aug 12 2

ABot-AgentOS: A General Robotic Agent OS with Lifelong Multi-modal Memory

Recent VLM and VLA systems have improved robotic perception and action prediction, yet long-horizon embodied agents still require a general runtime layer for reasoning, memory, tool use, verification, and cross-embodiment execution. We present ABot-AgentOS, a general robotic Agent Operating System that sits above low-level controllers and provides a deliberative agent layer for scene-conditioned planning, context-isolated skill execution, multi-stage verification, multi-modal memory, and edge-cloud collaboration. To evaluate such systems, we introduce EmbodiedWorldBench, an executable benchmark with 16 indoor, outdoor, and hybrid scenes, four difficulty levels, and over 200 tasks involving navigation, object search, NPC dialogue, dynamic events, and trace-grounded scoring. ABot-AgentOS further introduces Universal Multi-modal Graph Memory, a persistent source-grounded substrate that converts dialogue, visual observations, spatial context, temporal relations, and task traces into typed nodes and edges. A failure-driven self-evolution loop converts diagnosed memory failures into gated runtime evo-assets that are promoted only to later evaluation splits, preventing current-split ground-truth leakage while enabling continual improvement. On an initial EmbodiedWorldBench subset, ABot-AgentOS improves over a single-controller baseline in both task success and goal completion. Across memory benchmarks, ABot-AgentOS Static achieves 87.5 on LoCoMo, 59.9 on OpenEQA EM-EQA, 88.6 on Mem-Gallery, and 76.5 Acc@All on NExT-QA; self-evolution further improves LoCoMo to 88.7, OpenEQA to 60.4, and Mem-Gallery to 89.0. These results suggest that a general Agent OS layer can improve long-horizon embodied execution while providing persistent, auditable memory for continual interaction.

Mi-Memory: A Lifecycle Memory Framework for Personal AI

Personal AI is moving beyond chat-only interaction toward continuous services that span phones, cars, homes, wearables, cameras, and tools. In this setting, memory cannot remain a cache of prior conversations. It should serve as a continuity and governance substrate: preserving durable user state, grounding answers in multimodal and device evidence, supporting correction and forgetting, bounding policy evolution, and remaining deployable under latency, cost, privacy, and edge-cloud constraints. This technical report presents Mi-Memory, a lifecycle memory framework for Personal AI organized around four roles: Structure, Expansion, Evolution, and Deployment. A shared audit contract links these roles through four recurring artifact families: typed evidence payloads preserve source identity and provenance, diagnostic traces localize evidence loss across the serving pipeline, strategy artifacts make memory-policy changes explicit, and gate/rollback records bound accepted evolution. MiMemory instantiates the roles through MemStack, MemSense/MemFuse, D^{2}ACCI/E^{2}MEND, and LiteMem. In controlled-reference Structure evaluations, MemStack reaches 93.59%, 57.24%, and 87.47% on LoCoMo, PersonaMem-V2, and LongMemEval, respectively; other tracks report module-level, preliminary/internal, transfer-feasibility, or design-only evidence with explicit boundaries. MiMemory is a step toward auditable, evidence-gated, and deployment-aware memory systems for Personal AI. Project homepage: https://darwin-agent.github.io/Mi-Memory/ .

  • 18 authors
·
Jul 20

Adaptive Heuristics for Scheduling DNN Inferencing on Edge and Cloud for Personalized UAV Fleets

Drone fleets with onboard cameras coupled with computer vision and DNN inferencing models can support diverse applications. One such novel domain is for one or more buddy drones to assist Visually Impaired People (VIPs) lead an active lifestyle. Video inferencing tasks from such drones can help both navigate the drone and provide situation awareness to the VIP, and hence have strict execution deadlines. We propose a deadline-driven heuristic, DEMS-A, to schedule diverse DNN tasks generated continuously to perform inferencing over video segments generated by multiple drones linked to an edge, with the option to execute on the cloud. We use strategies like task dropping, work stealing and migration, and dynamic adaptation to cloud variability, to guarantee a Quality of Service (QoS), i.e. maximize the utility and the number of tasks completed. We also introduce an additional Quality of Experience (QoE) metric useful to the assistive drone domain, which values the frequency of success for task types to ensure the responsiveness and reliability of the VIP application. We extend our DEMS solution to GEMS to solve this. We evaluate these strategies, using (i) an emulated setup of a fleet of over 80 drones supporting over 25 VIPs, with real DNN models executing on pre-recorded drone video streams, using Jetson Nano edges and AWS Lambda cloud functions, and (ii) a real-world setup of a Tello drone and a Jetson Orin Nano edge generating drone commands to follow a VIP in real-time. Our strategies present a task completion rate of up to 88%, up to 2.7x higher QoS utility compared to the baselines, a further 16% higher QoS utility while adapting to network variability, and up to 75% higher QoE utility. Our practical validation exhibits task completion of up to 87% for GEMS and 33% higher total utility of GEMS compared to edge-only.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 30, 2024

EdgeGaussians -- 3D Edge Mapping via Gaussian Splatting

With their meaningful geometry and their omnipresence in the 3D world, edges are extremely useful primitives in computer vision. 3D edges comprise of lines and curves, and methods to reconstruct them use either multi-view images or point clouds as input. State-of-the-art image-based methods first learn a 3D edge point cloud then fit 3D edges to it. The edge point cloud is obtained by learning a 3D neural implicit edge field from which the 3D edge points are sampled on a specific level set (0 or 1). However, such methods present two important drawbacks: i) it is not realistic to sample points on exact level sets due to float imprecision and training inaccuracies. Instead, they are sampled within a range of levels so the points do not lie accurately on the 3D edges and require further processing. ii) Such implicit representations are computationally expensive and require long training times. In this paper, we address these two limitations and propose a 3D edge mapping that is simpler, more efficient, and preserves accuracy. Our method learns explicitly the 3D edge points and their edge direction hence bypassing the need for point sampling. It casts a 3D edge point as the center of a 3D Gaussian and the edge direction as the principal axis of the Gaussian. Such a representation has the advantage of being not only geometrically meaningful but also compatible with the efficient training optimization defined in Gaussian Splatting. Results show that the proposed method produces edges as accurate and complete as the state-of-the-art while being an order of magnitude faster. Code is released at https://github.com/kunalchelani/EdgeGaussians.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 19, 2024

TPM-Based Continuous Remote Attestation and Integrity Verification for 5G VNFs on Kubernetes

In the rapidly evolving landscape of 5G technology, the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure for the deployment of 5G services has become increasingly common. Using a service-based architecture, critical 5G components, such as the Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF), Session Management Function (SMF), and User Plane Function (UPF), now run as containerized pods on Kubernetes clusters. Although this approach improves scalability, flexibility, and resilience, it also introduces new security challenges, particularly to ensure the integrity and trustworthiness of these components. Current 5G security specifications (for example, 3GPP TS 33.501) focus on communication security and assume that network functions remain trustworthy after authentication, consequently lacking mechanisms to continuously validate the integrity of NVFs at runtime. To close this gap, and to align with Zero Trust principles of 'never trust, always verify', we present a TPM 2.0-based continuous remote attestation solution for core 5G components deployed on Kubernetes. Our approach uses the Linux Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to provide hardware-based runtime validation. We integrate the open-source Keylime framework with a custom IMA template that isolates pod-level measurements, allowing per-pod integrity verification. A prototype on a k3s cluster (consisting of 1 master, 2 worker nodes) was implemented to attest to core functions, including AMF, SMF and UPF. The experimental results show that the system detects unauthorized modifications in real time, labels each pod's trust state, and generates detailed audit logs. This work provides hardware-based continuous attestation for cloud native and edge deployments, strengthening the resilience of 5G as critical infrastructure in multi-vendor and mission-critical scenarios of 5G.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 3, 2025

HAQ: Hardware-Aware Automated Quantization with Mixed Precision

Model quantization is a widely used technique to compress and accelerate deep neural network (DNN) inference. Emergent DNN hardware accelerators begin to support mixed precision (1-8 bits) to further improve the computation efficiency, which raises a great challenge to find the optimal bitwidth for each layer: it requires domain experts to explore the vast design space trading off among accuracy, latency, energy, and model size, which is both time-consuming and sub-optimal. Conventional quantization algorithm ignores the different hardware architectures and quantizes all the layers in a uniform way. In this paper, we introduce the Hardware-Aware Automated Quantization (HAQ) framework which leverages the reinforcement learning to automatically determine the quantization policy, and we take the hardware accelerator's feedback in the design loop. Rather than relying on proxy signals such as FLOPs and model size, we employ a hardware simulator to generate direct feedback signals (latency and energy) to the RL agent. Compared with conventional methods, our framework is fully automated and can specialize the quantization policy for different neural network architectures and hardware architectures. Our framework effectively reduced the latency by 1.4-1.95x and the energy consumption by 1.9x with negligible loss of accuracy compared with the fixed bitwidth (8 bits) quantization. Our framework reveals that the optimal policies on different hardware architectures (i.e., edge and cloud architectures) under different resource constraints (i.e., latency, energy and model size) are drastically different. We interpreted the implication of different quantization policies, which offer insights for both neural network architecture design and hardware architecture design.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 5, 2019

Automatic assembly of aero engine low pressure turbine shaft based on 3D vision measurement

In order to solve the problem of low automation of Aero-engine Turbine shaft assembly and the difficulty of non-contact high-precision measurement, a structured light binocular measurement technology for key components of aero-engine is proposed in this paper. Combined with three-dimensional point cloud data processing and assembly position matching algorithm, the high-precision measurement of shaft hole assembly posture in the process of turbine shaft docking is realized. Firstly, the screw thread curve on the bolt surface is segmented based on PCA projection and edge point cloud clustering, and Hough transform is used to model fit the three-dimensional thread curve. Then the preprocessed two-dimensional convex hull is constructed to segment the key hole location features, and the mounting surface and hole location obtained by segmentation are fitted based on RANSAC method. Finally, the geometric feature matching is used the evaluation index of turbine shaft assembly is established to optimize the pose. The final measurement accuracy of mounting surface matching is less than 0.05mm, and the measurement accuracy of mounting hole matching based on minimum ance optimization is less than 0.1 degree. The measurement algorithm is implemented on the automatic assembly test-bed of a certain type of aero-engine low-pressure turbine rotor. In the narrow installation space, the assembly process of the turbine shaft assembly, such as the automatic alignment and docking of the shaft hole, the automatic heating and temperature measurement of the installation seam, and the automatic tightening of the two guns, are realized in the narrow installation space Guidance, real-time inspection and assembly result evaluation.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 12, 2020

An Edge Assisted Robust Smart Traffic Management and Signalling System for Guiding Emergency Vehicles During Peak Hours

Congestion in traffic is an unavoidable circumstance in many cities in India and other countries. It is an issue of major concern. The steep rise in the number of automobiles on the roads followed by old infrastructure, accidents, pedestrian traffic, and traffic rule violations all add to challenging traffic conditions. Given these poor conditions of traffic, there is a critical need for automatically detecting and signaling systems. There are already various technologies that are used for traffic management and signaling systems like video analysis, infrared sensors, and wireless sensors. The main issue with these methods is they are very costly and high maintenance is required. In this paper, we have proposed a three-phase system that can guide emergency vehicles and manage traffic based on the degree of congestion. In the first phase, the system processes the captured images and calculates the Index value which is used to discover the degree of congestion. The Index value of a particular road depends on its width and the length up to which the camera captures images of that road. We have to take input for the parameters (length and width) while setting up the system. In the second phase, the system checks whether there are any emergency vehicles present or not in any lane. In the third phase, the whole processing and decision-making part is performed at the edge server. The proposed model is robust and it takes into consideration adverse weather conditions such as hazy, foggy, and windy. It works very efficiently in low light conditions also. The edge server is a strategically placed server that provides us with low latency and better connectivity. Using Edge technology in this traffic management system reduces the strain on cloud servers and the system becomes more reliable in real-time because the latency and bandwidth get reduced due to processing at the intermediate edge server.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 26, 2023

ELLMPEG: An Edge-based Agentic LLM Video Processing Tool

Large language models (LLMs), the foundation of generative AI systems like ChatGPT, are transforming many fields and applications, including multimedia, enabling more advanced content generation, analysis, and interaction. However, cloud-based LLM deployments face three key limitations: high computational and energy demands, privacy and reliability risks from remote processing, and recurring API costs. Recent advances in agentic AI, especially in structured reasoning and tool use, offer a better way to exploit open and locally deployed tools and LLMs. This paper presents ELLMPEG, an edge-enabled agentic LLM framework for the automated generation of video-processing commands. ELLMPEG integrates tool-aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with iterative self-reflection to produce and locally verify executable FFmpeg and VVenC commands directly at the edge, eliminating reliance on external cloud APIs. To evaluate ELLMPEG, we collect a dedicated prompt dataset comprising 480 diverse queries covering different categories of FFmpeg and the Versatile Video Codec (VVC) encoder (VVenC) commands. We validate command generation accuracy and evaluate four open-source LLMs based on command validity, tokens generated per second, inference time, and energy efficiency. We also execute the generated commands to assess their runtime correctness and practical applicability. Experimental results show that Qwen2.5, when augmented with the ELLMPEG framework, achieves an average command-generation accuracy of 78 % with zero recurring API cost, outperforming all other open-source models across both the FFmpeg and VVenC datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 16

Edge Computing in Distributed Acoustic Sensing: An Application in Traffic Monitoring

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) technology leverages fiber optic cables to detect vibrations and acoustic events, which is a promising solution for real-time traffic monitoring. In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology for detecting and tracking vehicles using DAS data, focusing on real-time processing through edge computing. Our approach applies the Hough transform to detect straight-line segments in the spatiotemporal DAS data, corresponding to vehicles crossing the Astfjord bridge in Norway. These segments are further clustered using the Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm to consolidate multiple detections of the same vehicle, reducing noise and improving accuracy. The proposed workflow effectively counts vehicles and estimates their speed with only tens of seconds latency, enabling real-time traffic monitoring on the edge. To validate the system, we compare DAS data with simultaneous video footage, achieving high accuracy in vehicle detection, including the distinction between cars and trucks based on signal strength and frequency content. Results show that the system is capable of processing large volumes of data efficiently. We also analyze vehicle speeds and traffic patterns, identifying temporal trends and variations in traffic flow. Real-time deployment on edge devices allows immediate analysis and visualization via cloud-based platforms. In addition to traffic monitoring, the method successfully detected structural responses in the bridge, highlighting its potential use in structural health monitoring.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 4, 2024

Toward Edge General Intelligence with Agentic AI and Agentification: Concepts, Technologies, and Future Directions

The rapid expansion of sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks and the Internet of Things (IoT) has catalyzed the evolution from centralized cloud intelligence towards decentralized edge general intelligence. However, traditional edge intelligence methods, characterized by static models and limited cognitive autonomy, fail to address the dynamic, heterogeneous, and resource-constrained scenarios inherent to emerging edge networks. Agentic artificial intelligence (Agentic AI) emerges as a transformative solution, enabling edge systems to autonomously perceive multimodal environments, reason contextually, and adapt proactively through continuous perception-reasoning-action loops. In this context, the agentification of edge intelligence serves as a key paradigm shift, where distributed entities evolve into autonomous agents capable of collaboration and continual adaptation. This paper presents a comprehensive survey dedicated to Agentic AI and agentification frameworks tailored explicitly for edge general intelligence. First, we systematically introduce foundational concepts and clarify distinctions from traditional edge intelligence paradigms. Second, we analyze important enabling technologies, including compact model compression, energy-aware computing strategies, robust connectivity frameworks, and advanced knowledge representation and reasoning mechanisms. Third, we provide representative case studies demonstrating Agentic AI's capabilities in low-altitude economy networks, intent-driven networking, vehicular networks, and human-centric service provisioning, supported by numerical evaluations. Furthermore, we identify current research challenges, review emerging open-source platforms, and highlight promising future research directions to guide robust, scalable, and trustworthy Agentic AI deployments for next-generation edge environments.

  • 13 authors
·
Aug 26, 2025

Biases in Edge Language Models: Detection, Analysis, and Mitigation

The integration of large language models (LLMs) on low-power edge devices such as Raspberry Pi, known as edge language models (ELMs), has introduced opportunities for more personalized, secure, and low-latency language intelligence that is accessible to all. However, the resource constraints inherent in edge devices and the lack of robust ethical safeguards in language models raise significant concerns about fairness, accountability, and transparency in model output generation. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of text-based bias across language model deployments on edge, cloud, and desktop environments, aiming to evaluate how deployment settings influence model fairness. Specifically, we examined an optimized Llama-2 model running on a Raspberry Pi 4; GPT 4o-mini, Gemini-1.5-flash, and Grok-beta models running on cloud servers; and Gemma2 and Mistral models running on a MacOS desktop machine. Our results demonstrate that Llama-2 running on Raspberry Pi 4 is 43.23% and 21.89% more prone to showing bias over time compared to models running on the desktop and cloud-based environments. We also propose the implementation of a feedback loop, a mechanism that iteratively adjusts model behavior based on previous outputs, where predefined constraint weights are applied layer-by-layer during inference, allowing the model to correct bias patterns, resulting in 79.28% reduction in model bias.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 16, 2025 1

AI Flow at the Network Edge

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and their multimodal variants have led to remarkable progress across various domains, demonstrating impressive capabilities and unprecedented potential. In the era of ubiquitous connectivity, leveraging communication networks to distribute intelligence is a transformative concept, envisioning AI-powered services accessible at the network edge. However, pushing large models from the cloud to resource-constrained environments faces critical challenges. Model inference on low-end devices leads to excessive latency and performance bottlenecks, while raw data transmission over limited bandwidth networks causes high communication overhead. This article presents AI Flow, a framework that streamlines the inference process by jointly leveraging the heterogeneous resources available across devices, edge nodes, and cloud servers, making intelligence flow across networks. To facilitate cooperation among multiple computational nodes, the proposed framework explores a paradigm shift in the design of communication network systems from transmitting information flow to intelligence flow, where the goal of communications is task-oriented and folded into the inference process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework through an image captioning use case, showcasing the ability to reduce response latency while maintaining high-quality captions. This article serves as a position paper for identifying the motivation, challenges, and principles of AI Flow.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 19, 2024

FlatFormer: Flattened Window Attention for Efficient Point Cloud Transformer

Transformer, as an alternative to CNN, has been proven effective in many modalities (e.g., texts and images). For 3D point cloud transformers, existing efforts focus primarily on pushing their accuracy to the state-of-the-art level. However, their latency lags behind sparse convolution-based models (3x slower), hindering their usage in resource-constrained, latency-sensitive applications (such as autonomous driving). This inefficiency comes from point clouds' sparse and irregular nature, whereas transformers are designed for dense, regular workloads. This paper presents FlatFormer to close this latency gap by trading spatial proximity for better computational regularity. We first flatten the point cloud with window-based sorting and partition points into groups of equal sizes rather than windows of equal shapes. This effectively avoids expensive structuring and padding overheads. We then apply self-attention within groups to extract local features, alternate sorting axis to gather features from different directions, and shift windows to exchange features across groups. FlatFormer delivers state-of-the-art accuracy on Waymo Open Dataset with 4.6x speedup over (transformer-based) SST and 1.4x speedup over (sparse convolutional) CenterPoint. This is the first point cloud transformer that achieves real-time performance on edge GPUs and is faster than sparse convolutional methods while achieving on-par or even superior accuracy on large-scale benchmarks.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 20, 2023

EfficientLLM: Scalable Pruning-Aware Pretraining for Architecture-Agnostic Edge Language Models

Modern large language models (LLMs) driven by scaling laws, achieve intelligence emergency in large model sizes. Recently, the increasing concerns about cloud costs, latency, and privacy make it an urgent requirement to develop compact edge language models. Distinguished from direct pretraining that bounded by the scaling law, this work proposes the pruning-aware pretraining, focusing on retaining performance of much larger optimized models. It features following characteristics: 1) Data-scalable: we introduce minimal parameter groups in LLM and continuously optimize structural pruning, extending post-training pruning methods like LLM-Pruner and SparseGPT into the pretraining phase. 2) Architecture-agnostic: the LLM architecture is auto-designed using saliency-driven pruning, which is the first time to exceed SoTA human-designed LLMs in modern pretraining. We reveal that it achieves top-quality edge language models, termed EfficientLLM, by scaling up LLM compression and extending its boundary. EfficientLLM significantly outperforms SoTA baselines with 100M sim 1B parameters, such as MobileLLM, SmolLM, Qwen2.5-0.5B, OLMo-1B, Llama3.2-1B in common sense benchmarks. As the first attempt, EfficientLLM bridges the performance gap between traditional LLM compression and direct pretraining methods, and we will fully open source at https://github.com/Xingrun-Xing2/EfficientLLM.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 10, 2025

EdgeReasoning: Characterizing Reasoning LLM Deployment on Edge GPUs

Edge intelligence paradigm is increasingly demanded by the emerging autonomous systems, such as robotics. Beyond ensuring privacy-preserving operation and resilience in connectivity-limited environments, edge deployment offers significant energy and cost advantages over cloud-based solutions. However, deploying large language models (LLMs) for reasoning tasks on edge GPUs faces critical challenges from strict latency constraints and limited computational resources. To navigate these constraints, developers must balance multiple design factors - choosing reasoning versus non-reasoning architectures, selecting appropriate model sizes, allocating token budgets, and applying test-time scaling strategies - to meet target latency and optimize accuracy. Yet guidance on optimal combinations of these variables remains scarce. In this work, we present EdgeReasoning, a comprehensive study characterizing the deployment of reasoning LLMs on edge GPUs. We systematically quantify latency-accuracy tradeoffs across various LLM architectures and model sizes. We systematically evaluate prompt-based and model-tuning-based techniques for reducing reasoning token length while maintaining performance quality. We further profile test-time scaling methods with varying degrees of parallelism to maximize accuracy under strict latency budgets. Through these analyses, EdgeReasoning maps the Pareto frontier of achievable accuracy-latency configurations, offering systematic guidance for optimal edge deployment of reasoning LLMs.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 21, 2025

Eddy-VL 1.9B: Structural Pruning and Layered Distillation for Edge-Deployable Multimodal Embedding

In this report, we introduce Eddy-VL 1.9B, a compressed multimodal embedding model built on Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B for offline, edge-deployable vision-language retrieval. Eddy-VL targets air-gapped forensic and investigative settings where cloud APIs are unavailable and low latency is essential. Compression combines (i) probe-driven structural pruning that removes four redundant text-decoder layers (28 to 24) ranked by adjacent-layer linear CKA, and (ii) layered knowledge distillation with hole-covering teacher-student mappings, mid-layer attention-map 1-CKA, and final-layer MSE and cosine losses with Matryoshka dimensions {128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048}. The released model contains 1,926,188,032 parameters (3.85 GB bf16), representing approximately 9.5% fewer parameters than the 2.13B teacher model. Empirical evaluations on MMEB-V2 (78 tasks, VLM2Vec protocol) show that Eddy-VL achieves an overall score of 63.2 compared with 68.9 for the teacher, retaining 91.7% of the teacher's performance while recovering 6.4 of the 12.1 points lost through pruning alone (56.8). Compositional reasoning performance remains close to the teacher on SugarCrepe (86.1 vs. 86.4), MR2-Bench (24.5 vs. 24.7), and ARO (59.5 vs. 60.4), while Winoground group performance (6.8 vs. 8.5) remains the primary limitation. Depth pruning also reduces forward latency by approximately 10% (150.0 to 136.4 ms per image on NVIDIA DGX Spark using FlashAttention-2). We present the architecture, compression methodology, training procedures, and evaluation results, demonstrating the effectiveness of Eddy-VL for multimodal retrieval under constrained edge deployment. Model weights and inference code are publicly available on Hugging Face.

Urock-AI Urock
·
Jul 14

Privacy-Preserving Edge Federated Learning for Intelligent Mobile-Health Systems

Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are generally designed for scenarios in which all data is stored in one data center, where the training is performed. However, in many applications, e.g., in the healthcare domain, the training data is distributed among several entities, e.g., different hospitals or patients' mobile devices/sensors. At the same time, transferring the data to a central location for learning is certainly not an option, due to privacy concerns and legal issues, and in certain cases, because of the communication and computation overheads. Federated Learning (FL) is the state-of-the-art collaborative ML approach for training an ML model across multiple parties holding local data samples, without sharing them. However, enabling learning from distributed data over such edge Internet of Things (IoT) systems (e.g., mobile-health and wearable technologies, involving sensitive personal/medical data) in a privacy-preserving fashion presents a major challenge mainly due to their stringent resource constraints, i.e., limited computing capacity, communication bandwidth, memory storage, and battery lifetime. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving edge FL framework for resource-constrained mobile-health and wearable technologies over the IoT infrastructure. We evaluate our proposed framework extensively and provide the implementation of our technique on Amazon's AWS cloud platform based on the seizure detection application in epilepsy monitoring using wearable technologies.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 12, 2024

LiDAR-PTQ: Post-Training Quantization for Point Cloud 3D Object Detection

Due to highly constrained computing power and memory, deploying 3D lidar-based detectors on edge devices equipped in autonomous vehicles and robots poses a crucial challenge. Being a convenient and straightforward model compression approach, Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) has been widely adopted in 2D vision tasks. However, applying it directly to 3D lidar-based tasks inevitably leads to performance degradation. As a remedy, we propose an effective PTQ method called LiDAR-PTQ, which is particularly curated for 3D lidar detection (both SPConv-based and SPConv-free). Our LiDAR-PTQ features three main components, (1) a sparsity-based calibration method to determine the initialization of quantization parameters, (2) a Task-guided Global Positive Loss (TGPL) to reduce the disparity between the final predictions before and after quantization, (3) an adaptive rounding-to-nearest operation to minimize the layerwise reconstruction error. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LiDAR-PTQ can achieve state-of-the-art quantization performance when applied to CenterPoint (both Pillar-based and Voxel-based). To our knowledge, for the very first time in lidar-based 3D detection tasks, the PTQ INT8 model's accuracy is almost the same as the FP32 model while enjoying 3times inference speedup. Moreover, our LiDAR-PTQ is cost-effective being 30times faster than the quantization-aware training method. Code will be released at https://github.com/StiphyJay/LiDAR-PTQ.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 28, 2024

TinyAgent: Function Calling at the Edge

Recent large language models (LLMs) have enabled the development of advanced agentic systems that can integrate various tools and APIs to fulfill user queries through function calling. However, the deployment of these LLMs on the edge has not been explored since they typically require cloud-based infrastructure due to their substantial model size and computational demands. To this end, we present TinyAgent, an end-to-end framework for training and deploying task-specific small language model agents capable of function calling for driving agentic systems at the edge. We first show how to enable accurate function calling for open-source models via the LLMCompiler framework. We then systematically curate a high-quality dataset for function calling, which we use to fine-tune two small language models, TinyAgent-1.1B and 7B. For efficient inference, we introduce a novel tool retrieval method to reduce the input prompt length and utilize quantization to further accelerate the inference speed. As a driving application, we demonstrate a local Siri-like system for Apple's MacBook that can execute user commands through text or voice input. Our results show that our models can achieve, and even surpass, the function-calling capabilities of larger models like GPT-4-Turbo, while being fully deployed at the edge. We open-source our dataset, models, and installable package and provide a demo video for our MacBook assistant agent.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 1, 2024

PMAA: A Progressive Multi-scale Attention Autoencoder Model for High-Performance Cloud Removal from Multi-temporal Satellite Imagery

Satellite imagery analysis plays a vital role in remote sensing, but the information loss caused by cloud cover seriously hinders its application. This study presents a high-performance cloud removal architecture called Progressive Multi-scale Attention Autoencoder (PMAA), which simultaneously leverages global and local information. It mainly consists of a cloud detection backbone and a cloud removal module. The cloud detection backbone uses cloud masks to reinforce cloudy areas to prompt the cloud removal module. The cloud removal module mainly comprises a novel Multi-scale Attention Module (MAM) and a Local Interaction Module (LIM). PMAA establishes the long-range dependency of multi-scale features using MAM and modulates the reconstruction of the fine-grained details using LIM, allowing for the simultaneous representation of fine- and coarse-grained features at the same level. With the help of diverse and multi-scale feature representation, PMAA outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model CTGAN consistently on the Sen2_MTC_Old and Sen2_MTC_New datasets. Furthermore, PMAA has a considerable efficiency advantage, with only 0.5% and 14.6% of the parameters and computational complexity of CTGAN, respectively. These extensive results highlight the potential of PMAA as a lightweight cloud removal network suitable for deployment on edge devices. We will release the code and trained models to facilitate the study in this direction.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 29, 2023

Trust Mechanisms for Offline Generative AI at the Edge: A Connectivity-Regime Framework and an Empirical Study on a Raspberry Pi 5

Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are moving into the Internet of Things, yet most deployments assume cloud connectivity, and many IoT settings have intermittent, restricted, or no connectivity. We propose a connectivity-regime framework (C0-C4), a taxonomy of inference-time trust mechanisms, and signed, versioned knowledge packs as the update channel for disconnected regimes, and evaluate them on a Raspberry Pi 5 running fully local retrieval-augmented generation under network isolation, with three Qwen2.5 model sizes, three context sizes, and 300 SQuAD 2.0 questions. An empirically calibrated retrieval-score gate detects knowledge gaps almost perfectly (AUROC 0.97) but in-topic unanswerable questions poorly (0.68). A deterministic output validator converts malformed outputs into explicit abstentions with no observed loss of correct answers, while the NLI-based verifier we tested adds little; for the 7B model, 96% of substantive answers to unanswerable-labelled questions match normalized spans of the retrieved passages. A 3B model achieves the same gold-answer containment rate as a 7B model at less than half the latency and estimated energy, although the 7B model far more often exceeds a token-F1 threshold of 0.5; five retrieved passages lower correctness from 75% to 52% compared with three. Verifying a signed pack takes about 4.5 ms versus about 29 min for embedding its passages on the device; signature and hash checks alone accept six of nine tested update attacks that layered verification rejects. Yet a validly signed poisoned pack passes every pack check: on 30 previously correct questions, correct answers drop to zero and 14 return the injected answer. None of the mechanisms we evaluated establishes the truth of the evidence. We release code and data.

UniQL: Unified Quantization and Low-rank Compression for Adaptive Edge LLMs

Deploying large language model (LLM) models on mobile platforms faces significant challenges due to the limited memory and shared computational resources of the device. Resource availability may be an issue as it is directly impacted by the current device workload, adding to the uncertainty of model deployment. We introduce UniQL, a unified post-training quantization and low-rank compression framework with on-device configurable pruning rates for edge LLMs. UniQL is a general framework that integrates quantization and low-rank compression for Transformers, State Space Models (SSMs), and hybrid models to support diverse edge applications. In our proposed joint framework, we introduce an efficient structured weight-sorting method that speeds up computation by 20x, quantization-aware singular value decomposition (SVD) to minimize quantization errors, state-aware weight sorting for SSMs, and a fused rotary positional embedding (RoPE) kernel for pruned models. Our framework performs weight-sorting, fine-tuning, and quantization in the cloud in a single-pass workflow, while enabling on-device configurable pruning rates up to 35%. Our experiments show that quantized and pruned models achieve a memory reduction of 4x-5.7x and a token-throughput improvement of 2.7x-3.4x, maintaining accuracy within 5% of the original models at 15% pruning across Transformers (Llama3 and Qwen2.5), SSMs (Mamba2), and hybrid models (Nemotron-H and Bamba-v2). The code and quantized models are available at: https://github.com/enyac-group/UniQL.

BitRL: Reinforcement Learning with 1-bit Quantized Language Models for Resource-Constrained Edge Deployment

The deployment of intelligent reinforcement learning (RL) agents on resource-constrained edge devices remains a fundamental challenge due to the substantial memory, computational, and energy requirements of modern deep learning systems. While large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful architectures for decision-making agents, their multi-billion parameter scale confines them to cloud-based deployment, raising concerns about latency, privacy, and connectivity dependence. We introduce BitRL, a framework for building RL agents using 1-bit quantized language models that enables practical on-device learning and inference under severe resource constraints. Leveraging the BitNet b1.58 architecture with ternary weights (-1, 0, +1) and an optimized inference stack, BitRL achieves 10-16x memory reduction and 3-5x energy efficiency improvements over full-precision baselines while maintaining 85-98 percent of task performance across benchmarks. We provide theoretical analysis of quantization as structured parameter perturbation, derive convergence bounds for quantized policy gradients under frozen-backbone architectures, and identify the exploration-stability trade-off in extreme quantization. Our framework systematically integrates 1-bit quantized language models with reinforcement learning for edge deployment and demonstrates effectiveness on commodity hardware.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 26

TinyLLM: Evaluation and Optimization of Small Language Models for Agentic Tasks on Edge Devices

This paper investigates the effectiveness of small language models (SLMs) for agentic tasks (function/tool/API calling) with a focus on running agents on edge devices without reliance on cloud infrastructure. We evaluate SLMs using the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) framework and describe parameter-driven optimization strategies that include supervised fine-tuning (SFT), parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), reinforcement learning (RL)-based optimization, preference alignment via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and hybrid methods. We report results for models including TinyAgent, TinyLlama, Qwen, and xLAM across BFCL categories (simple, multiple, parallel, parallel-multiple, and relevance detection), both in live and non-live settings, and in multi-turn evaluations. We additionally detail a DPO training pipeline constructed from AgentBank data (e.g., ALFRED), including our conversion of SFT data to chosen-rejected pairs using TinyLlama responses as rejected outputs and manual validation. Our results demonstrate clear accuracy differences across model scales where medium-sized models (1-3B parameters) significantly outperform ultra-compact models (<1B parameters), achieving up to 65.74% overall accuracy, and 55.62% multi-turn accuracy with hybrid optimization. This study highlights the importance of hybrid optimization strategies that enable small language models to deliver accurate, efficient, and stable agentic AI on edge devices, making privacy-preserving, low-latency autonomous agents practical beyond the cloud.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 26, 2025

GPSFormer: A Global Perception and Local Structure Fitting-based Transformer for Point Cloud Understanding

Despite the significant advancements in pre-training methods for point cloud understanding, directly capturing intricate shape information from irregular point clouds without reliance on external data remains a formidable challenge. To address this problem, we propose GPSFormer, an innovative Global Perception and Local Structure Fitting-based Transformer, which learns detailed shape information from point clouds with remarkable precision. The core of GPSFormer is the Global Perception Module (GPM) and the Local Structure Fitting Convolution (LSFConv). Specifically, GPM utilizes Adaptive Deformable Graph Convolution (ADGConv) to identify short-range dependencies among similar features in the feature space and employs Multi-Head Attention (MHA) to learn long-range dependencies across all positions within the feature space, ultimately enabling flexible learning of contextual representations. Inspired by Taylor series, we design LSFConv, which learns both low-order fundamental and high-order refinement information from explicitly encoded local geometric structures. Integrating the GPM and LSFConv as fundamental components, we construct GPSFormer, a cutting-edge Transformer that effectively captures global and local structures of point clouds. Extensive experiments validate GPSFormer's effectiveness in three point cloud tasks: shape classification, part segmentation, and few-shot learning. The code of GPSFormer is available at https://github.com/changshuowang/GPSFormer.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 18, 2024

RAGdb: A Zero-Dependency, Embeddable Architecture for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation on the Edge

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has established itself as the standard paradigm for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) in domain-specific, up-to-date data. However, the prevailing architecture for RAG has evolved into a complex, distributed stack requiring cloud-hosted vector databases, heavy deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, CUDA), and high-latency embedding inference servers. This ``infrastructure bloat'' creates a significant barrier to entry for edge computing, air-gapped environments, and privacy-constrained applications where data sovereignty is paramount. This paper introduces RAGdb, a novel monolithic architecture that consolidates automated multimodal ingestion, ONNX-based extraction, and hybrid vector retrieval into a single, portable SQLite container. We propose a deterministic Hybrid Scoring Function (HSF) that combines sublinear TF-IDF vectorization with exact substring boosting, eliminating the need for GPU inference at query time. Experimental evaluation on an Intel i7-1165G7 consumer laptop demonstrates that RAGdb achieves 100\% Recall@1 for entity retrieval and an ingestion efficiency gain of 31.6x during incremental updates compared to cold starts. Furthermore, the system reduces disk footprint by approximately 99.5\% compared to standard Docker-based RAG stacks, establishing the ``Single-File Knowledge Container'' as a viable primitive for decentralized, local-first AI. Keywords: Edge AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Vector Search, Green AI, Serverless Architecture, Knowledge Graphs, Efficient Computing.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 8, 2025

Generative Model for Models: Rapid DNN Customization for Diverse Tasks and Resource Constraints

Unlike cloud-based deep learning models that are often large and uniform, edge-deployed models usually demand customization for domain-specific tasks and resource-limited environments. Such customization processes can be costly and time-consuming due to the diversity of edge scenarios and the training load for each scenario. Although various approaches have been proposed for rapid resource-oriented customization and task-oriented customization respectively, achieving both of them at the same time is challenging. Drawing inspiration from the generative AI and the modular composability of neural networks, we introduce NN-Factory, an one-for-all framework to generate customized lightweight models for diverse edge scenarios. The key idea is to use a generative model to directly produce the customized models, instead of training them. The main components of NN-Factory include a modular supernet with pretrained modules that can be conditionally activated to accomplish different tasks and a generative module assembler that manipulate the modules according to task and sparsity requirements. Given an edge scenario, NN-Factory can efficiently customize a compact model specialized in the edge task while satisfying the edge resource constraints by searching for the optimal strategy to assemble the modules. Based on experiments on image classification and object detection tasks with different edge devices, NN-Factory is able to generate high-quality task- and resource-specific models within few seconds, faster than conventional model customization approaches by orders of magnitude.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 28, 2023

Humains-Junior: A 3.8B Language Model Achieving GPT-4o-Level Factual Accuracy by Directed Exoskeleton Reasoning

We introduce Humans-Junior, a 3.8B model that matches GPT-4o on the FACTS Grounding public subset within a pm 5 pp equivalence margin. Results. On Q1--Q500 under identical judges, GPT-4o scores 73.5% (95% CI 69.5--77.2) and Humans-Junior 72.7% (95% CI 68.7--76.5); the paired difference is 0.8 pp (bootstrap 95% CI -3.1 to +4.7; permutation p = 0.72; Cohen's d = 0.023). TOST establishes equivalence at pm 5 pp (not at pm 3 pp). When purchased as managed APIs, Humans-Junior's base model (Phi-3.5-mini-instruct) is approx 19times less expensive than GPT-4o on Microsoft AI Foundry pricing; self-hosted or edge deployments can drive incremental inference cost toward zero. Measured vs estimated pricing sources are tabulated in Appendix E. Method. Our approach combines minimal directed "Exoskeleton Reasoning" scaffolds with behavioral fine-tuning that teaches protocol compliance (epistemic discipline) rather than domain answers. Fine-tuning alone adds little; combined, they synergize (+17.7 pp, p < 0.001) and reduce variance (approx 25%). In prompt-only settings on frontier models (Q1--Q100; non-comparable), directed reasoning improved GPT-4o by +11.8 pp to 85.3% and Gemini-2.5-Pro by +5.0 pp to 93.3% (baseline 88.3%, n = 100); see Section~5. TL;DR. A 3.8B model achieves GPT-4o-level FACTS accuracy (equivalent within pm 5 pp on Q1--Q500). Cloud pricing shows approx 19times lower cost versus GPT-4o, and self-hosted/edge deployments can approach zero marginal cost. Pricing sources are listed in Appendix E. Frontier prompt-only gains (Q1--Q100; non-comparable) and optimized-prompt exploratory results under earlier judges are summarized in Appendix F. Keywords: Small Language Models, Factual Grounding, Directed Reasoning, Fine-Tuning, Model Alignment, Cost-Efficient AI

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 29, 2025 2

Clairvoyant: Predictive SJF Scheduling to Mitigate Head-of-Line Blocking in Serial LLM Backends

Serial LLM inference backends -- such as Ollama -- process requests one at a time under FCFS admission, causing Head-of-Line Blocking (HOLB) under mixed workloads at high utilisation: short factual queries can be delayed by minutes behind long generation jobs. While cloud-scale deployments mitigate HOLB via continuous batching (vLLM, Orca), these solutions require tens of GB of VRAM for concurrent KV-caches -- infeasible for memory-constrained edge and local deployments that rely on serial request dispatch. We present \clairvoyant, a drop-in sidecar proxy for any serial OpenAI-compatible backend (e.g., Ollama, llama.cpp). \clairvoyant predicts response length from 19 lightweight lexical features via an ONNX-exported XGBoost classifier, achieving 0.029\,ms per-request latency (four orders of magnitude below typical generation time). Because admission scheduling depends on relative ordering rather than exact prediction, the system optimises ranking fidelity, achieving 62--96\% in-distribution and 52--66\% cross-distribution accuracy across natural conversation datasets. We find that curated instruction datasets are degenerate training sources for length prediction: GPT-imposed brevity constraints reduce Long-class representation to under 0.02\% of examples, making natural conversation logs the only viable training source. End-to-end GPU benchmarks on an RTX~4090 show 70--76\% P50 latency reduction for short requests under maximum queue pressure (100 concurrent requests) and 17\% under steady-state Poisson arrivals (ρ=0.74). \clairvoyant is open-source and requires no modifications to the inference backend.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 4

A Survey of Model Extraction Attacks and Defenses in Distributed Computing Environments

Model Extraction Attacks (MEAs) threaten modern machine learning systems by enabling adversaries to steal models, exposing intellectual property and training data. With the increasing deployment of machine learning models in distributed computing environments, including cloud, edge, and federated learning settings, each paradigm introduces distinct vulnerabilities and challenges. Without a unified perspective on MEAs across these distributed environments, organizations risk fragmented defenses, inadequate risk assessments, and substantial economic and privacy losses. This survey is motivated by the urgent need to understand how the unique characteristics of cloud, edge, and federated deployments shape attack vectors and defense requirements. We systematically examine the evolution of attack methodologies and defense mechanisms across these environments, demonstrating how environmental factors influence security strategies in critical sectors such as autonomous vehicles, healthcare, and financial services. By synthesizing recent advances in MEAs research and discussing the limitations of current evaluation practices, this survey provides essential insights for developing robust and adaptive defense strategies. Our comprehensive approach highlights the importance of integrating protective measures across the entire distributed computing landscape to ensure the secure deployment of machine learning models.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 21, 2025

Memory- and Latency-Constrained Inference of Large Language Models via Adaptive Split Computing

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved near-human performance across diverse reasoning tasks, yet their deployment on resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices remains impractical due to massive parameter footprints and memory-intensive autoregressive decoding. While split computing offers a promising solution by partitioning model execution between edge devices and cloud servers, existing approaches fail to address the unique challenges of autoregressive inference, particularly the iterative token generation process and expanding key-value (KV) cache requirements. This work introduces the first autoregressive-aware split computing framework designed explicitly for LLM deployment on edge devices. Our approach makes three key contributions. First, we develop one-point split compression (OPSC), a mixed-precision quantization scheme that prevents out-of-memory failures by strategically partitioning models into front-end and back-end segments with different precision levels. Second, we propose a two-stage intermediate compression pipeline that combines threshold splitting (TS) and token-wise adaptive bit quantization (TAB-Q) to preserve accuracy-critical activations while dramatically reducing communication overhead. Third, we formulate a unified optimization framework that jointly selects optimal split points, quantization settings, and sequence lengths to satisfy strict memory and latency constraints. Extensive evaluations across diverse LLMs and hardware platforms demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art quantization methods, including SmoothQuant, OmniQuant, and Atom. The framework achieves a 1.49 inference speedup and significant communication overhead reduction while maintaining or improving model accuracy.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 5, 2025

PockEngine: Sparse and Efficient Fine-tuning in a Pocket

On-device learning and efficient fine-tuning enable continuous and privacy-preserving customization (e.g., locally fine-tuning large language models on personalized data). However, existing training frameworks are designed for cloud servers with powerful accelerators (e.g., GPUs, TPUs) and lack the optimizations for learning on the edge, which faces challenges of resource limitations and edge hardware diversity. We introduce PockEngine: a tiny, sparse and efficient engine to enable fine-tuning on various edge devices. PockEngine supports sparse backpropagation: it prunes the backward graph and sparsely updates the model with measured memory saving and latency reduction while maintaining the model quality. Secondly, PockEngine is compilation first: the entire training graph (including forward, backward and optimization steps) is derived at compile-time, which reduces the runtime overhead and brings opportunities for graph transformations. PockEngine also integrates a rich set of training graph optimizations, thus can further accelerate the training cost, including operator reordering and backend switching. PockEngine supports diverse applications, frontends and hardware backends: it flexibly compiles and tunes models defined in PyTorch/TensorFlow/Jax and deploys binaries to mobile CPU/GPU/DSPs. We evaluated PockEngine on both vision models and large language models. PockEngine achieves up to 15 times speedup over off-the-shelf TensorFlow (Raspberry Pi), 5.6 times memory saving back-propagation (Jetson AGX Orin). Remarkably, PockEngine enables fine-tuning LLaMav2-7B on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin at 550 tokens/s, 7.9times faster than the PyTorch.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 26, 2023 4

Are We There Yet? A Measurement Study of Efficiency for LLM Applications on Mobile Devices

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have prompted interest in deploying these models on mobile devices to enable new applications without relying on cloud connectivity. However, the efficiency constraints of deploying LLMs on resource-limited devices present significant challenges. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive measurement study to evaluate the efficiency tradeoffs between mobile-based, edge-based, and cloud-based deployments for LLM applications. We implement AutoLife-Lite, a simplified LLM-based application that analyzes smartphone sensor data to infer user location and activity contexts. Our experiments reveal that: (1) Only small-size LLMs (<4B parameters) can run successfully on powerful mobile devices, though they exhibit quality limitations compared to larger models; (2) Model compression is effective in lower the hardware requirement, but may lead to significant performance degradation; (3) The latency to run LLMs on mobile devices with meaningful output is significant (>30 seconds), while cloud services demonstrate better time efficiency (<10 seconds); (4) Edge deployments offer intermediate tradeoffs between latency and model capabilities, with different results on CPU-based and GPU-based settings. These findings provide valuable insights for system designers on the current limitations and future directions for on-device LLM applications.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025