MANE: A Multi-Path Adaptive Network for Edge Onloading of Deep Neural Networks

Recently, mobile edge computing (MEC)-enabled collaborative deep neural network (DNN) inference has emerged as a promising approach for delivering intelligent services to resource-constrained mobile devices. A representative scenario is multi-user collaborative edge inference, where distinct devices independently partition their DNN models and offload backend computation to a common edge server over wireless networks. However, determining the optimal DNN partition for each device is challenging due to unknown and time-varying system conditions, including fluctuating wireless links and diverse device capabilities. To address this problem, we propose Cooperative Autodidactic NeuroSurgeon (CANS), a collaborative edge inference framework that enables devices to adaptively learn optimal DNN partitions by sharing informative feedback during online inference. To handle the challenge of device heterogeneity and better leverage offline inference experience, we integrate a novel FedLinUCB-DW algorithm that groups devices of the same type and warm-starts online exploration using local offline early-exit inference experience. Furthermore, we provide theoretical guarantees for FedLinUCB-DW by deriving the regret upper bound. We also validate our method on both a simulated environment and a hardware prototype system. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that CANS achieves lower inference latency compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Especially, in prototype experiments on two edge devices, the proposed CANS reduced average inference latency by up to 50% compared to the non-cooperative baseline.

Edge intelligence systems increasingly require model training and online inference to coexist on resource-constrained devices, while inference demand can vary substantially across tasks over time. This creates two coupled challenges: sufficient computation must be reserved for inference to maintain service-level objectives (SLOs), while the remaining training capacity should adapt to task-specific demand so that frequently requested tasks can improve earlier during training. We propose an SLO-aware, demand-driven multitask federated learning framework (DART-FL) that jointly adapts the inference-training resource split and task-level training emphasis. At each scheduling interval, DART-FL uses the inference backlog and profiled service capacity to determine the minimum resource allocation required for inference. The remaining training capacity is then distributed across tasks using a queue-aware DPP-inspired scheduler, and the resulting task allocations are mapped to dynamic loss weights. This allows tasks experiencing higher inference demand to receive greater training emphasis in earlier communication rounds. Clients train a shared backbone with task-specific heads, and the complete multitask model is aggregated through FedAvg. We evaluate DART-FL using Stanford Cars and Oxford Flowers 102 under both synthetic and real Alibaba trace-derived workloads. Results show that DART-FL dynamically adapts the inference-training resource split to time-varying inference demand and shifts the learning progress of high-demand tasks toward their burst periods, improving model accuracy when those tasks are frequently requested while maintaining comparable long-term multitask performance.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become a dominant architecture for large-scale AI services, yet deploying them over geo-distributed heterogeneous edge servers remains challenging. When the Top-k activated experts of a token are spread across multiple servers, the optimal routing depends jointly on cross-server link bandwidth, heterogeneous GPU computing capability, GPU-CPU expert loading delay, instantaneous queueing backlog, and replica-level quantization quality loss. Existing distributed inference and MoE serving methods address these factors separately and do not provide a unified framework for online multi-server collaborative routing. In this paper, we propose HetRoute, a heterogeneous-cost-aware collaborative routing framework for distributed edge MoE inference. HetRoute introduces a unified per-assignment cost model that explicitly captures four cost components: cross-server transmission, GPU-CPU offloading, GPU computation with queueing, and quantization-induced quality penalty. Guided by this model, the offline stage determines expert server placement, GPU-CPU residency, and replica precision through a routing-cost-coupled deployment algorithm, while the online stage routes the Top-k activated expert set as a whole by minimizing the bottleneck layer cost via exact enumeration or beam search. Theoretical analysis establishes fallback feasibility, a bound on the number of participating servers, per-layer optimality for small candidate domains, and online computational complexity. Trace-driven evaluation on three MoE models over a heterogeneous 10-server edge testbed shows that HetRoute reduces average inference latency by up to 59.0% and P99 latency by up to 58.0%, cuts cross-server traffic by up to 72.1%, and achieves 2.13x throughput improvement compared with representative baselines, while keeping quality degradation within the configured budget.