Multi-Turn Reasoning LLMs for Task Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing
Authors: Ning Yang, Chuangxin Cheng, Haijun Zhang
Organizations: Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China · School of Mechano-Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, China · School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, 100083, China
Emerging computation-intensive applications impose stringent latency requirements on resource-constrained mobile devices. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) addresses this challenge through task offloading. However, designing effective policies remains difficult due to dynamic task arrivals, time-varying channels, and the spatio-temporal coupling of server queues. Conventional heuristics lack adaptability, while Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) suffers from limited generalization and architectural rigidity, requiring retraining when network topology changes. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) offer semantic reasoning capabilities, standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) yields myopic policies that greedily minimize immediate latency without accounting for long-term system evolution. To address these limitations, we propose COMLLM, a generative framework that enables foresighted decision-making in MEC systems. COMLLM integrates Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a Look-Ahead Collaborative Simulation (LACS) mechanism, which performs multi-step Monte Carlo rollouts while jointly modeling server queue dynamics. By incorporating these rollouts into the reward design, the framework captures the long-term impact of current decisions on future system states. Experimental results demonstrate that COMLLM achieves near-optimal latency and improved load-balancing fairness. Notably, it exhibits zero-shot topological scalability, allowing a model trained on small-scale networks to generalize to larger, unseen topologies without retraining, outperforming SFT, DRL, and heuristic baselines.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Overview of COMLLM. MEC states are serialized into textual prompts for SFT initialization. During GRPO training, candidate actions are evaluated using the physical MEC cost and LACS, whereas deployment requires only a single policy inference.
Category
Parameter
Value
System Environment
Time slot duration Δt
0.1 s
Local CPU frequency floc
2 GHz
Edge server CPU frequency Fe
[20.0,48.0] GHz
Average uplink rate Ru,eup
14 Mbps
Task size Dt
[2.0,5.0] Mbits
Computational density γ
0.297 gigacycles/Mbit
TABLE I: Parameter settings in the experimental setup
Model
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Performance Ratio
Load Balancing Index
(time slots)
(%)
(%)
(%)
COMLLM
3.0745
0.00
96.86
73.87
GRPO-7B
3.1197
0.00
95.46
71.20
DQN
3.3966
4.35
87.68
65.64
SFT-7B
4.0989
0.33
72.65
41.39
GRPO-1.5B
4.3096
1.63
69.10
19.94
TABLE II: Overall performance comparison of offloading policies
Model
Task Size 2 Mbits
Task Size 4 Mbits
Task Size 6 Mbits
Task Size 8 Mbits
Task Size 10 Mbits
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Average Latency
Drop Rate
(time slots)
(%)
(time slots)
(%)
(time slots)
(%)
(time slots)
(%)
(time slots)
(%)
COMLLM
1.8515
0.00
3.7409
0.00
5.3290
0.00
6.9759
1.08
9.5363
2.78
GRPO-7B
1.9723
0.00
3.8420
0.00
5.4595
0.00
7.1910
2.16
9.8527
4.31
SFT-7B
3.1702
0.00
4.9999
0.00
6.9515
3.03
9.2281
31.11
12.4634
55.02
GRPO-1.5B
2.7558
0.00
5.1860
2.00
7.0620
8.08
8.5224
20.00
11.4648
28.23
TABLE III: Performance under different task workload levels
Model
3 Servers
5 Servers
7 Servers
9 Servers
11 Servers
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Perf. Ratio
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Perf. Ratio
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Perf. Ratio
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Perf. Ratio
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Perf. Ratio
(time slots)
(%)
(%)
(time slots)
(%)
(%)
(time slots)
(%)
(%)
(time slots)
(%)
(%)
(time slots)
(%)
(%)
COMLLM
3.4097
0.00
93.90
3.0688
0.00
96.99
2.9026
0.00
98.59
2.8447
0.00
96.64
3.1114
0.00
97.42
GRPO-7B
3.4527
0.00
92.73
3.0718
0.00
96.90
2.9123
0.00
98.26
2.8518
0.00
96.41
3.1174
0.00
97.23
SFT-7B
4.2683
0.00
75.01
4.3316
0.00
68.72
3.5708
0.00
80.14
3.8498
0.00
71.41
4.4130
0.00
68.69
GRPO-1.5B
4.6658
2.54
68.62
4.3707
0.96
68.10
4.3243
1.70
66.18
3.8503
0.00
71.40
4.7216
2.76
64.20
TABLE IV: Performance under different edge-server topologies
Model
Local
Server1
Server2
Server3
Server4
Server5
Server6
Server7
Server8
Server9
Server10
Server11
Load Bal. Index(%)
COMLLM
6
14
52
62
26
27
18
39
19
19
6
18
73.87
GRPO-7B
1
16
53
66
27
26
19
39
22
19
0
18
71.20
DQN
16
18
48
10
64
50
35
25
16
10
10
4
65.64
SFT-7B
136
9
67
30
17
4
11
1
0
3
9
19
41.39
GRPO-1.5B
12
192
43
10
19
10
1
0
4
10
0
5
19.94
Random
59
46
42
51
26
31
16
15
10
6
1
3
63.42
TABLE V: Offloading distribution and load balancing index
Model
Standard Env.
Shuffled Params.
Noisy Env.
Unit Variation
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Load Bal. Index
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Load Bal. Index
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Load Bal. Index
Average Latency
Drop Rate
Load Bal. Index
(time slots)
(%)
(%)
(time slots)
(%)
(%)
(time slots)
(%)
(%)
(time slots)
(%)
(%)
COMLLM
3.0675
0.00
94.71
3.0684
0.00
95.27
3.0617
0.00
94.18
3.0620
0.00
92.67
GRPO-7B
3.0722
0.00
93.20
3.0836
0.00
95.13
3.0868
0.00
93.12
3.0885
0.00
92.14
SFT-7B
4.3581
0.00
85.23
4.2393
0.00
87.76
4.1582
0.00
90.14
4.1999
0.00
84.94
GRPO-1.5B
4.3831
1.91
74.29
4.3666
1.47
69.07
4.3879
1.91
77.43
4.3710
0.48
69.21
TABLE VI: Robustness under semantic prompt perturbations