COHORT: Hybrid RL for Collaborative Large DNN Inference on Multi-Robot Systems Under Real-Time Constraints

Deploying learned multi-robot models on heterogeneous robots remains challenging due to hardware heterogeneity, communication constraints, and the lack of a unified execution stack. This paper presents NeuroMesh, a multi-domain, cross-platform, and modular decentralized neural inference framework that standardizes observation encoding, message passing, aggregation, and task decoding in a unified pipeline. NeuroMesh combines a dual-aggregation paradigm for reduction- and broadcast-based information fusion with a parallelized architecture that decouples cycle time from end-to-end latency. Our high-performance C++ implementation leverages Zenoh for inter-robot communication and supports hybrid GPU/CPU inference. We validate NeuroMesh on a heterogeneous team of aerial and ground robots across collaborative perception, decentralized control, and task assignment, demonstrating robust operation across diverse task structures and payload sizes. We plan to release NeuroMesh as an open-source framework to the community.

As Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference becomes increasingly prevalent on edge and mobile platforms, critical challenges emerge in privacy protection, resource constraints, and dynamic model deployment. This paper proposes a privacy-aware collaborative inference framework, in which adaptive model partitioning is performed across edge devices and servers. To jointly optimize inference delay, energy consumption, and privacy cost under dynamic service demands and resource constraints, we formulate the joint problem as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) that integrates model deployment, user-server association, model partitioning, and resource allocation. We propose a Hierarchical Constrained Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization with Lagrangian relaxation (HC-MAPPO-L) algorithm, a safe reinforcement learning-based framework that enhances Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) with adaptive Lagrangian dual updates to enforce long-term delay constraints. To ensure tractability while maintaining coordination, we decompose the CMDP into three hierarchically structured policy layers: an auto-regressive based model deployment policy, a Lagrangian-enhanced user association and model partitioning policy, and an attention-based resource allocation policy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HC-MAPPO-L consistently satisfies stringent delay constraints while achieving a superior balance among energy consumption and privacy cost, outperforming representative baseline algorithms across varying problem scales and resource configurations.

Large language models (LLMs) provide robots with richer task understanding and adaptability, making them promising for coordinating heterogeneous multi-robot systems in long-horizon tasks. Despite this potential, several challenges remain underexplored: (1) Centralized LLM schedulers scale poorly as team size and environmental complexity increase. A single model must process excessive contextual information, and long-context approximation may degrade reasoning quality; (2) Existing task formulations insufficiently consider dynamic settings, while robust adaptation to evolving task conditions is essential for real-world deployment; (3) Domain-specific data scarcity limits specialized robotic reasoning, making proprietary general-purpose models inefficient for expert tasks. To address these limitations, we propose DynaHMRC, a decentralized framework in which each robot acts as a role-aware LLM agent. This design mitigates the single-model context bottleneck and supports flexible collaboration across heterogeneous team configurations. DynaHMRC organizes collaboration as a four-stage closed-loop process: self-description, task allocation with leadership bidding, leader election, and reflective execution, supported by executable robot interfaces. We further develop a benchmark covering three task families, four dynamic variations, and six team configurations to systematically study dynamic task modeling. In addition, we conduct an empirical analysis to guide the construction of domain-specific expert datasets and fine-tune pretrained LLMs to improve specialized competence. Experiments show that DynaHMRC achieves higher success rates than strong baselines with fewer action and communication steps, while demonstrating promising scalability trends as team size grows within the evaluated settings.