Position Paper: From Edge AI to Adaptive Edge AI

Industrial systems increasingly depend on Machine Learning (ML), and operate on heterogeneous nodes that must satisfy tight latency, energy, and memory constraints. Dynamic ML models, which reconfigure their computational footprint at runtime, promise high energy efficiency and lower average latency for modest accuracy tradeoffs; however, their deployment is complex due to the additional hyperparameters they rely on. These hyperparameters, controlling the accuracy versus average latency tradeoff, are often tuned on a calibration dataset that must match the test time distribution, an assumption that rarely holds in real-world scenarios, leading to suboptimal operational conditions, possibly below static models. We propose a two-tier adaptive architecture that co-optimizes model and system decisions. At the global level, a scheduler configures and deploys, for each edge node, a cascade of classifiers composed of lightweight specialized models and a generalist fallback, satisfying latency and memory constraints. At the node level, a local controller tracks data drifts and hardware resources, enabling or disabling specialized predictors (SP) to preserve high energy efficiency and avoid latency-constraint violations under varying conditions. This design allows longer operating times without forcing a global redeployment step, and enables efficient execution in case of an unreachable remote global controller. We evaluate the approach on two datasets under controlled distribution mismatch scenarios, showing average per-inference reductions of latency up to 2.45x and energy up to 2.86x, with less than 4% accuracy drop compared to static baselines. Our contributions are:(1) a budgeted SP-cascade formulation that preserves worst-case latency constraints;(2) a hierarchical controller that maintains efficiency under data and resource changes; and (3) an experimental evaluation on embedded hardware.

Edge deployments of generative inference increasingly face two practical realities: per-device per-model performance is often unknown at deployment time, and it is non-stationary due to user-driven semantic events, background load, and device churn. Consequently, a resource manager that is tuned offline under a fixed regime can become brittle and expensive to maintain. This paper presents $E^3$-Agent, an executable and evolving agent for edge artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC) resource management. $E^3$-Agent separates a fast-path router that makes millisecond-level dispatch decisions from a slow-path, event-driven large language model (LLM) meta-controller that mitigates regime shifts through a small, explicit control surface exposed via a tool interface, including risk gating, router configuration, and rapid performance calibration. The agent learns online from execution feedback and continuously adapts to unknown and time-varying service-time mappings. We evaluate $E^3$-Agent in a discrete-event simulator driven by MLPerf-derived device-model measurement priors, covering cold-start warmup and three dynamic regimes: semantic dynamics, device churn, and hidden drift. Across the dynamic scenarios, $E^3$-Agent reduces average latency by 65%-73% compared to the best static baseline, stays within 7%-10% of an online full-information Oracle used for evaluation, and effectively suppresses stutter rate under semantic degradation.

EdgeAI systems are increasingly employing computer vision applications to enable intelligent, on-device decision-making in real-time. However, these deployments face highly dynamic operational conditions, with fluctuating constraints on latency, power availability, and memory resources. Deep Neural Networks (DNN), which follow fixed computational execution flows, lack the flexibility to adapt to such variability, resulting in inefficient and suboptimal performance in edge scenarios. This underscores the need for architectures that are not only efficient but also dynamically scalable at runtime. In this paper, we propose Elastoformer: A framework that transforms conventional neural networks (NN) into Elastic NN capable of real-time elastic inference. Unlike the conventional bag-of-models approach, which requires maintaining multiple independent models for different operating conditions, Elastoformer offers a single, modular solution that dynamically switches between multiple modes of operation at runtime, adapting efficiently to the changing computational budgets of edge devices without the overhead of managing separate models. Experiments reveal that our framework achieves up to 85% reduction in computation FLOPs, 50% reduction in latency and 76% reduction in memory overhead, while showcasing the architecture agnostic nature of the framework across both Vision Transformers and CNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/sudaksh14/Elastoformer.