Resource-constrained cyber-physical decision systems often apply fixed sensing, knowledge, and computational pipelines despite state-dependent information needs. We introduce Minimum-Sufficient Knowledge and Computation (MSKC), a resource-aware computing principle: select the least-costly route meeting decision-risk and deployment constraints, escalating only when cheaper routes are insufficient. As proof of concept, we isolate adaptive knowledge routing, the decision underlying Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning (KGML), which conventionally injects external knowledge unconditionally rather than only where needed. We instantiate this for wind ramp-event predictive analysis, an edge-oriented decision-support task, evaluating local, relational, and physics-informed routes with a state-aware gate on publicly available real data from two wind farms. We establish conditions for feasibility preservation, cost dominance, and strict expected savings over always-on routing. At a 35.9% relational-knowledge injection rate, adaptive routing is statistically indistinguishable from always-on injection on the reported metrics while reducing knowledge calls by 64%, supporting sustainable, Green-IT-aligned deployment. These results support MSKC's premise that uniformly maximal intelligence is unnecessary. This offers intelligent data analysis for big data streams: the analysis itself decides, per state, how much knowledge and computation the data warrant.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Overview of the MSKC selection process: candidate routes are filtered by certified sufficiency, resource, and admissibility checks into the feasible set A(s) , from which the minimum-carbon route r∗(s) is selected, with fallback to rH or deferral as described in Section III . The highlighted region marks the two-route knowledge-acquisition instance evaluated empirically in this paper.
Fig. 2: The minimum-sufficient route selection procedure. Starting from the cheapest candidate route, the system checks accuracy, resource fit, and safety together; a failed check escalates to the next costlier route, while a route that passes all three is used immediately. If no route in the menu ever passes, the system defers the decision rather than acting on an unsupported one.
Fig. 3: This figure explains why the selected route can never cost more than the fallback rH . Ordinary routes ( r0,r1,r2,… ) must pass all three checks, accurate enough, fits resources, safe, to reach the feasible set; some fail and drop out. rH is assumed to always pass and reaches the feasible set by a guaranteed path regardless. Because the final selection r∗ is always the cheapest option inside this same feasible set, and rH is always one of its members, r∗ can never be more expensive than rH .
Kelmarsh
Penmanshiel
Turbines
6
5 (of 14)
Rated power (kW)
2050
2050
Rotor diameter (m)
92.0
82.0
Hub height (m)
68.5–78.5
59.0
Period
2024 (1 year)
Resolution
10 min
TABLE I: Wind farm specifications and dataset summary after cleaning. Ranges are taken across each site’s turbines.
Region
Share of labeled rows
Severe down-ramp
1.7%
Moderate down-ramp
10.7%
Stable
75.1%
Moderate up-ramp
10.8%
Severe up-ramp
1.7%
TABLE II: Ordinal ramp-region label distribution, pooled across both sites.
Fig. 4: Validation of the ordinal ramp-region labeling mechanism: power trace shaded by assigned region (top), the underlying change signal against its thresholds (middle), and the full-year, all-turbine distribution of that signal (bottom).
Fig. 5: Macro-F1 as a function of injection rate under the swept gate threshold.
Fig. 6: Spatial layout and neighbor availability at both sites; a four-day trace of true region, predicted region, and injection decision; the deployed gate’s confusion matrix; within-site versus cross-site severe recall; and the learned KUS gating-strategy comparison at matched injection rate.
Population
Route
Macro F1
Sev. recall
Comm. cost
Neighbor-avail.
Base ( r0 )
0.280
0.701
none
Relational ( r1 )
0.273
0.751
required
Full test
Base ( r0 )
0.263
0.694
none
Physics ( r2 )
0.266
0.705
none
TABLE III: Knowledge route scores, reported separately for each route’s own paired evaluation population.
AI power demand is growing at an unprecedented rate while power grids are often ailing and struggle to keep up. Grid expansion comes with high capital expenditure and long-distance transmission losses, yet there is abundant renewable energy at the source, just not matched to demand. This paper proposes a complementary AI infrastructure deployment model, AI Greeninferencing, that brings modular AI compute to renewable energy sources, focusing on wind, allowing AI footprint expansion, generating local behind-the-meter demand for renewable sites, and helping ease the growing strain on power utilities. Our feasibility analysis shows that 890+ GW of wind capacity lies within 50 ms network round trip time of Azure data centers, and that site-wise right-sizing combined with spatial complementarity of wind energy keeps aggregate fleet utilization on par with traditional deployments. To serve inference requests under variable wind power, we build XWind, a lightweight, reactive, and workload-agnostic AI inference router that uses only real-time signals: inference latency, KV-cache utilization, and queue depth, to dynamically configure sites and distribute requests. Evaluated on a real 64-GPU A100 testbed emulating three wind-powered sites with Azure production traces, XWind reduces P99 end-to-end latency by up to 52% over the strongest contender (also our idea) and by up to 98% over baselines such as power-capping and GPU idling, with consistent gains across workload types, load levels, and GPU generations.
Energy feasibility under wind uncertainty is a critical safety issue for low-altitude air-ground delivery. In truck-UAV systems, UAVs complete assigned deliveries and safely return to a mobile truck or depot, while wind-induced propulsion costs vary online and are only partially observable. Existing routing methods often rely on static or deterministic energy models, which may underestimate headwind, crosswind, battery-voltage, and return-feasibility risks. This paper proposes Energy-Aware Wind-Resilient Routing (EWR), an online risk-sensitive planning framework for wind-aware and energy-safe UAV routing. The delivery environment is represented as a time-dependent directed energy graph whose edge costs are updated using delayed noisy wind estimates, payload states, and conservative uncertainty margins. Experiments using synthetic delivery graphs with replayed wind logs from a public truck-UAV delivery dataset show that EWR improves mission success rates and reduces wind-induced return failures.
Tianshun Li, Yanggang Sheng, Hongliang Lu +3
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), China · Southern University of Science and Technology, China · Intelligent Transportation Thrust, Systems Hub, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), China
A key strategy for balancing performance and cost in modern machine learning systems is to dynamically route queries to either a low-cost model or a more expensive oracle (such as a large pretrained model or human expert), an approach known as model routing. In this work we present a new uncertainty-aware router that (1) avoids unnecessary oracle calls on inherently ambiguous queries, and (2) adapts dynamically to different loss functions and cost parameters through simple hyperparameter changes, without retraining. Our method, applicable to any classification setting where multiple independent annotations per input are available, is based on decomposing total uncertainty into irreducible and reducible components using higher-order predictors [Ahdritz et al., 2025]. This enables a unified approach to both routing and abstention: predict with the weak model when uncertainty is low, route to the oracle when reducible uncertainty is high, and abstain when irreducible uncertainty is high. Our router comes with strong theoretical guarantees bounding regret relative to optimal task-specific routers. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets that demonstrate the benefits of our approach in suitable regimes -- in particular, whenever reducible and irreducible uncertainty are not too correlated.
Charlotte Peale, Siddartha Devic, Parikshit Gopalan +2
1Stanford University · University of Southern California · 3Apple