Edge-Cloud Continuum

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3 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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Period ending 2026-09-14

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Edge-Cloud Continuum.

Period ending 2026-09-07

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Edge-Cloud Continuum.

26 papers

Latest in Edge-Cloud Continuum

Sep 14, 2026cs.DC

CIDERS: Cloud-Edge LLM Collaborative Learning via Accelerating Personalized Bilevel Optimization

Amid the rapid advancement of physical-world intelligence, cloud-edge collaborative large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising roadmap for practical LLM deployment. However, existing cloud-edge paradigms struggle to balance global consensus with local personalization, which fails to satisfy the need for a unified knowledge foundation on the cloud and domain-specific adaptation at the edge. To address this, we introduce, for the first time, a personalized bilevel optimization framework that formalizes cloud-edge LLM collaboration as a dual structure: the upper level optimizes edge-side personalization, while the lower level governs cloud-side knowledge transfer, reaching cloud-edge evolving in coordination. We then propose CIDERS, an efficient solver that decomposes the model into a learnable backbone and a messenger. While the cloud performs knowledge transfer to the learnable backbone, the key lies in embedding global trajectories into each local personalization step via consensus-variate correction to reconcile personalization with consensus. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis, including a geometric characterization of the local trajectory and a full convergence guarantee, revealing an explicit trade-off structure between personalization and global convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIDERS consistently outperforms competitive baselines on the compressed edge path, with 3.1x and 1.7x gains on mathematical reasoning and code generation, respectively, and a 10% relative gain on instruction metrics. Mechanism experiments attribute these gains to early consensus-corrected coordination and task-aware distillation. Overall, CIDERS offers a viable path toward consensus-guided continuous personalization in cloud-edge LLM systems.
Victor H. Chen, Hairui Yu, Stella K. Chung +1
Sep 10, 2026cs.DC

Smart Adaptive Computing Across the Continuum: LLMs in IoT-Edge-Cloud Resource Management

Managing resources across IoT, edge, and cloud layers calls for continuous, context-aware decisions under constraints that rarely stay fixed. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) handles this class of problems well, and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to augment DRL pipelines, yet the architectural relationship between the two is seldom made explicit. We build on Wang et al.'s taxonomy of Continuum Orchestration Systems employing DRL techniques and extend it with two further dimensions. The AI Augmentation Paradigm measures how LLMs are exploited, while the Feedback channel captures whether and through which system path the execution feedback returns to the LLM in order to close the MAPE control loop at the LLM Orchestration layer. We apply this taxonomy to six recent system architectures and find a common gap, as none combines full LLM orchestration with full agent-layer feedback in a Cloud Continuum setting. We relate this gap to a missing cross-tier feedback abstraction, bridging the incommensurable per-tier signals and the LLM Orchestrator.
Antonino Vaccarella, Lanpei Li, Vincenzo Lomonaco +1
Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

PPO-STGNN: A Proximal Policy Optimization Approach with Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks for DAG Task Scheduling in Cloud-Edge-End Computing

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, computation intensive directed acyclic graph (DAG) tasks have become increasingly common in cloud-edge-end collaborative environments. However, cloud, edge, and end nodes are highly heterogeneous in computing capacity, network bandwidth, and energy consumption, which makes the efficient scheduling of tasks with complex dependencies an NP-hard problem. Traditional heuristic algorithms and conventional reinforcement-learning methods often fail to capture the spatio-temporal dynamics of system resources. This paper proposes PPO-STGNN, a DAG task-scheduling algorithm that integrates proximal policy optimization (PPO) with spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs). The method uses an STGNN to extract features from both the DAG task topology and the physical cloud-edge-end resource graph, and then optimizes the scheduling policy through PPO to minimize makespan and schedule length ratio (SLR) while improving CPU and memory load balancing. To accelerate convergence, a multi-teacher behavior-cloning mechanism is introduced for pretraining. Experimental results show that PPO-STGNN significantly improves load balancing while maintaining a low completion time, making it suitable for dynamic and heterogeneous cloud-edge- end DAG scheduling scenarios.
Yangshuo Qi, Chenwei Wang, Zihan Shen +1
Sep 1, 2026cs.DC

Update for Decisions, Not Freshness: Goal-Oriented Status Updating and Selective Offloading at the Network Edge

In an edge--cloud collaborative edge-computing environment, an edge node (EN) must decide whether each user task should be executed locally, forwarded to a remote service (or cloud) node (SN), or rejected. The EN observes its local state directly but receives the SN state only through an intermittently refreshed cache. Status updating and task control therefore form an asynchronous closed loop under partial observability. Freshness-driven schemes, including those based on Age of Information (AoI), do not directly value an update by its effect on subsequent task decisions. We propose CoSMO (Co-design of Semantic-state Management and Offloading), a cooperative event-driven reinforcement learning (RL) framework that coordinates semantic status management and selective offloading through realized task utility. CoSMO learns a compact representation of the heterogeneous SN service state. At the SN, a recurrent semi-Markov double deep Q-network (Double DQN) agent jointly selects send/no-send and the next decision interval. At the EN, a task-terminal off-policy value-learning agent makes hierarchical gate--route decisions from local observations and stale remote semantics. The agents maintain separate observations and value targets but share the same realized task-utility stream, without centralized execution. Across the evaluated workload families, CoSMO's reported relative improvement in on-time completion rate over the best-performing competing method averages 18.6%--21.2%. For capacity-aware decision accuracy across the three strict-overload points, the corresponding reported gains average 17.6%--$17.9%.
Jianpeng Qi, Qiyang Zhang, Chao Liu +5
Aug 13, 2026cs.LG

A Cloud-Edge System for Multimodal Clinical Screening in Resource-Constrained Rural Settings

Medical AI has demonstrated specialist-level diagnostic accuracy, yet these capabilities remain largely inaccessible in resource-constrained rural settings where bandwidth is scarce, compute is limited, and clinical decision-making requires integrating heterogeneous modalities. We introduce a cloud--edge collaborative architecture that addresses these constraints: lightweight, domain-specific models on the edge transform raw medical data into compact structured outputs, while a cloud LLM synthesizes these outputs into clinical summaries. An LLM-based orchestrator dynamically selects diagnostic tools based on patient context, promoting comprehensive modality coverage without processing irrelevant inputs. We evaluate on 20 multimodal clinical cases spanning cardiac, obstetric, trauma, and screening scenarios under three simulated network profiles (500,kbps--5,Mbps). The hybrid system achieves 98--99% diagnostic tool recall with 92--96% precision, matches or exceeds cloud-only baselines on clinical accuracy, and maintains bandwidth-invariant latency (25--35,s) at 4--15x lower token cost. These results highlight the role of architectural design in enabling efficient multimodal integration and improving factual grounding compared to cloud-only approaches under deployment constraints.
Hei Ting, Chan, Chenwei Wu +8
Aug 11, 2026cs.NI

Conversational Orchestration for Organic 6G

The Organic 6G vision of a network of networks spanning an edge-cloud continuum complemented by non-terrestrial resources requires, to realize its promise, service provisioning that is simple to operate, scalable across independently administered domains, and agile under domain churn (i.e., domains dynamically joining and leaving). Despite advances in cross-domain orchestration, many proposals rely on heavy integration fabrics, multi-layer coordinators, and deep telemetry pipelines that hinder deployability and amplify coordination overhead. We propose a lightweight, decentralized conversational orchestration framework based on Large Language Model (LLM)-driven domain agents. Each domain remains autonomous: an agent observes local state via tools, reasons in a closed loop, and exchanges summaries with neighboring agents over an Agent-to-Agent (A2A) overlay aligned with data-plane coupling. Fast feasible placement is enabled by periodic, routing-like dissemination of reachability advertisements (latency, bottleneck bandwidth, and compute capacity), while safe re-optimization, scaling, and migration are handled through event-driven requests and negotiation. To meet real-time constraints, we deploy a compact reasoning model trained with verifier-based self-verification and periodically refined online via shadow updates. Simulations show manageable, near-linear control-plane overhead as domains scale and during domain joins, and robust decision quality, including recovery after objective changes. We close by outlining future research directions for principled, secure, and uncertainty-aware agentic orchestration in Organic 6G.
Masoud Shokrnezhad, Tarik Taleb
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

Design and Evaluation of an AI-Enabled Cloud-Edge Architecture for Connected Precision Agriculture Farms

Plant diseases cause significant yield losses worldwide, with tomato crops particularly susceptible to early blight, late blight, and leaf mold. Manual monitoring is practical only for small-scale farms and becomes unmanageable at larger scales. To tackle this limitation, an artificial intelligence (AI) enabled cloud-edge architecture is proposed for autonomous crop monitoring. This proposed architecture integrates Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), deep learning, Azure IoT Hub-based cloud analytics, and multi-platform (mobile app, web app, and embedded edge device platform) interfaces to enable real-time detection of tomato diseases. For training and validation, we used publicly available datasets, such as PlantVillage and Kaggle. A TensorFlow model trained on a collected dataset is deployed across mobile, web, and edge-device platforms. Experimental results show detection effectiveness around 92-95%, with consistent performance over diverse environments and device platforms. The proposed system improves disease detection effectiveness, lowers dependence on manual inspection, and enables prompt interventions, thereby supporting sustainable, connected precision agriculture farms.
Deckshitha Angadi, Koteshwar Goud Surga, Nagaraju Lakkaraju +6
Jul 28, 2026cs.CV

VetClaw: An Edge-Cloud Multimodal Agentic System for Veterinary Disease Screening

We present VetClaw, an edge-cloud multimodal agentic system for early veterinary disease screening. VetClaw uses a camera module as an edge sensing device and sends captured images, together with optional symptom descriptions, to a server-hosted vision-language model for zero-shot disease classification. The system separates agent interaction from workflow orchestration: OpenClaw provides scheduling, tool access, user interaction, and notification services on the edge device, while LangGraph manages the stateful screening workflow, including input validation, image transmission, model invocation, safety checks, conditional routing, failure handling, and structured logging. This design moves beyond static image classification by enabling the system to collect visual evidence, invoke external models, apply deterministic safety rules, and generate diagnostic-support alerts. Results show that image-only VLM prediction remains limited, whereas symptom-guided and multimodal inputs improve zero-shot classification performance. Thus, VetClaw transforms a static prediction model into a coordinated, safety-aware system that can use tools, manage workflows, handle failures, and escalate uncertain cases.
Syed Mhamudul Hasan, Anas AlSobeh, Hussein Zangoti +1
Jun 29, 2026cs.RO

CSAR: Containerized System Architecture for Robotics

Robotic applications increasingly rely on distributed computational infrastructures that combine embedded devices, edge servers, and cloud resources. This evolution, together with the collaborative nature of robotics projects, has made the development, integration, deployment, and long-term operation of robotic systems significantly more complex. In practice, multi-user robotics software teams face persistent challenges related to dependency isolation, compatibility, reproducibility, efficient sharing of specialized hardware, and deployment across heterogeneous environments. In this paper, we present CSAR (Containerized System Architecture for Robotics), a container-centric architectural framework designed specifically for robotics teams and the edge-cloud continuum. CSAR combines LXC/LXD-based system containerization, ROS 2/DDS-based communication, and a three-layer edge infrastructure to organize computation into hardware-affine, persistent execution environments that remain decoupled from the volatility of experimental workloads. Through its Infrastructure Core, Platform and Multi-User Orchestration, and Compute and Acceleration layers, CSAR provides strong isolation, controlled resource sharing, and topology-aware networking for distributed robotic applications. To demonstrate its validity, we describe a real deployment of CSAR in an academic robotics laboratory and evaluate it through representative use cases involving edge-offloaded 3D SLAM and GPU-accelerated semantic mapping. The results indicate that CSAR simplifies software integration, improves the utilization of shared computational resources, and facilitates safe prototyping, as well as reproducible and collaborative experimentation in robotics teams. The implementation described in this paper, including deployment templates, configuration files, and documentation, is available at https://github.com/goyoambrosio/CSAR.
Ambrosio-Cestero, Gregorio, Galindo Andrades +5
Jun 25, 2026cs.CR

TGHE: Template-based Graph Homomorphic Encryption for Privacy-Preserving GNN Inference in Edge-Cloud Systems

Existing homomorphic encryption (HE)-based GNN systems adopt a graph-centric paradigm that couples per-query cost to global graph size, limiting evaluations to at most ~20k nodes and making them incompatible with dynamic, large-scale financial graphs. We propose TGHE (Template-based Graph Homomorphic Encryption), an ego-centric framework that resolves this by exploiting a template phenomenon: local computation trees in transaction graphs converge into a small set of structural shapes. TGHE canonicalizes ego-graphs at the edge and packs structurally identical trees into shared CKKS ciphertexts for SIMD-parallel encrypted inference, with two long-tail optimizers (Approximate Template Fitting and Topology Collapse) ensuring full SIMD coverage. On DGraphFin (3.7M nodes, 4.3M edges), TGHE-Collapse achieves a 66.9x speedup over the sequential encrypted baseline with less than 0.002 AUC loss.
Ngoc Bao Anh Le, Thai T. Vu, John Le +2
Jun 22, 2026cs.CV

CoVStream: Edge-Cloud Collaboration for Understanding of Long Video Streams

Long, continuous video streams are an increasingly critical driver of multimedia intelligence. Existing efforts often handle long videos with a sample-encode-reason approach using large models. However, they overlook a crucial deployment fact: the stream is often produced by computationally constrained devices. This forces an untenable compromise: cloud offloading unlocks strong reasoning but incurs prohibitive bandwidth overhead, while on-device processing remains limited by edge hardware capacity. Therefore, we propose CoVStream, the first edge-cloud collaborative framework for understanding long video streams. The edge node distills raw video streams into compact visual features and semantic captions for transmission to the cloud, minimizing bandwidth costs, while the cloud server integrates this data into an entity graph and global visual context, activating the heavy reasoning model only when a user query arrives. Experiments on VideoMME-Long, LVBench, and RTV-Bench show that CoVStream reduces bandwidth usage by 87.6% while retaining 99.2% of the cloud baseline accuracy on LVBench.
Xu Liu, Guikun Chen, Zihao Yan +2
Jun 11, 2026cs.DC

SemanticXR: Low Power and Real-time Queryable Semantic Mapping with an Object-Level Device-Cloud Architecture

Semantic mapping is a core service that enables grounded interactions in emerging Extended Reality (XR) applications such as AI assistants and spatial object search. Deploying this capability on mobile XR devices requires a system that is open-vocabulary, real-time, and low-power. Existing approaches are compute-intensive and assume server-class resources. Cloud offloading offers a practical path, but no existing system splits semantic mapping across the device-cloud boundary or manages its communication, execution, and memory footprint. We present SemanticXR, the first device-cloud system for real-time, open-vocabulary semantic mapping and querying under XR power, bandwidth, and memory constraints. Our key insight is to elevate semantically identifiable objects to first-class units of communication, execution, and memory across the device and server. On the server, object-level parallelism and geometry downsampling improve mapping latency, while object-level depth-mapping co-design reduces upstream bandwidth. On the device, an object-level sparse local map with incremental updates and update prioritization enables network-robust querying with bounded memory and downstream bandwidth. Object-level configurable resource usage vs. quality trade-offs let applications and the system adapt mapping to application requirements and operating conditions, respectively. Against a device-cloud baseline with the same perception models, object-level organization improves server-side mapping latency by 2.2X at equal semantic quality. Depth-mapping co-design maintains upstream bandwidth under 2.5 Mbps. On the device, SemanticXR sustains sub-100 ms query latency for up to 10,000 objects even under network drops, supports tens of thousands of objects within 500 MB, and scales downstream bandwidth with map changes, not total scene size. The system adds only 2% device power during normal operation.
Rahul Singh, Devdeep Ray, Connor Smith +1
Jun 8, 2026cs.LG

Zero Touch Predictive Orchestration: Automating Time-Series Models for the Cloud-Edge Continuum

The Cloud-Edge Continuum (CEC) enables latency-critical applications by distributing resources to the far edge, but its extreme volatility makes proactive Zero Touch Management via time-series forecasting essential. However, orchestrators face a severe "cold start" problem: newly discovered nodes lack the historical data required to train localized predictive models, while generalized models fail to capture unique hardware and microservice behaviors. To solve this, we propose a fully automated time-series prediction architecture driven by a novel data-mixing methodology. At the infrastructure level, we introduce a lightweight, technology-agnostic Resource Exposer (RE) that dynamically discovers nodes and continuously collects customizable telemetry (e.g., compute, network, energy). To overcome the sparsity of these initial local samples, our framework automatically merges them with TimeTrack, our publicly available, high-resolution dataset collected at 45-second intervals. This synergizes TimeTrack's foundational, high-frequency temporal patterns with the precise calibration of the local node data. Processed through a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) engine, the system automatically generates highly accurate baseline models. Experimental results demonstrate that merging the target data with TimeTrack effectively mitigates the cold start challenge. This integration significantly improves forecasting accuracy measured in Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and accelerates convergence compared to training on the sparse local samples alone, training solely on generic datasets, or mixing the target data with standard alternative datasets, establishing a robust foundation for continuous MLOps deployment.
Abd Elghani Meliani, Arora Sagar, Adlen Ksentini +1
Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

From Prompt to Service: An SLM-Based Agent Orchestration Gateway for AI-Driven Virtual Worlds

As generative AI capabilities expand, AI-driven virtual worlds face a growing architectural challenge. Users interact through in-world interfaces in multimodal ways, yet their requests demand fundamentally different AI backend models and computational resources. Embedding these capabilities directly into virtual world systems reduces extensibility, complicates maintenance, and limits the ability to coordinate services distributed across edge and cloud infrastructure. This paper presents an SLM-based Agent Orchestration Gateway, a lightweight runtime coordination mechanism that decouples a virtual world client from heterogeneous AI backends through intent-driven service routing. An edge-deployed SLM classifies the semantic intent of each user prompt, a configurable service registry validates and resolves the routing decision, and the selected backend is invoked transparently, enabling new AI capabilities to be introduced in the virtual world without modifying the client application. The gateway is implemented and evaluated within the InterwovenXR virtual museum testbed. The evaluation shows that compact SLMs can serve as reliable intent routers on edge hardware, and that task-specific fine-tuning can transform sub-billion-parameter models into practical, low-latency routers. A layered configuration pairing a fine-tuned sub billion-parameter model as router with a larger SLM for conversational response generation is shown to be deployable on mid-range edge hardware and more efficient than delegating both responsibilities to a single model. The findings show that SLMs can support practical AI service orchestration in virtual worlds and the work contributes an evaluated architecture for scalable, extensible, and edge-supported AI interaction, enabling virtual agents become access points to distributed generative AI services.
Louis Nisiotis, Aimilios Hadjiliasi
May 30, 2026cs.AI

CoMIC: Collaborative Memory and Insights Circulation for Long-Horizon LLM Agents in Cloud-Edge Systems

Deploying lightweight Large Language Model (LLM) agents on edge servers can reduce latency and move agentic services closer to users, but resource-constrained edge models often struggle with long-horizon tasks that require persistent memory, subgoal tracking, and reflection. Fine-tuning edge models after deployment is costly and difficult to scale across heterogeneous nodes, while purely local memory leaves agents with isolated experience and growing prompt context. We propose \textsc{CoMIC}, a parameter-update-free cloud-edge framework for Collaborative Memory and Insights Circulation. \textsc{CoMIC} follows a \textit{Centralized Reflection, Decentralized Execution} design: edge agents execute locally using subgoal-oriented hierarchical memory and selective re-expansion of relevant histories, while a cloud-side LLM critic asynchronously evaluates completed trajectories, filters reusable experience, and aggregates cross-agent guidance keyed by semantic subgoal identifiers. Across five long-horizon agent tasks spanning symbolic planning and text interaction, \textsc{CoMIC} improves progress rate and action grounding for weak edge agents and yields task-dependent success-rate gains without updating model parameters.
Yannan Wang, Longli Yang, Zhen Liu +2
May 26, 2026cs.DC

Autonomic Federated-Market Orchestration for the Edge-Cloud Continuum

The edge-cloud computing continuum demands self-management mechanisms that scale across autonomous administrative domains while honouring tenant- and operator-specified data sovereignty. We present Neural Pub/Sub, a federated-broker autonomic substrate whose self-organising behaviour emerges from market-based price signals rather than centralised control. Its MAPE-K control loop closes over per-broker health and load monitoring, marginal-cost clearing-price analysis, placement planning over a polymatroidal feasibility region, federated cross-domain dispatch, and shared peer subscription summaries with bounded-staleness price signals. The Plan step is anchored in a Walrasian convergence proposition: under gross-substitutes valuations on tree and series-parallel service-dependency DAGs, decentralised price-based allocation matches the welfare of a centralised oracle. We evaluate the substrate on a 4-VM, 4-domain, 48-worker federated edge-cloud testbed (single data centre, 50 ms emulated WAN) in a 1005-run campaign augmented by a fair-process-count sharded-oracle comparator. The federated market dominates a single-process oracle by 2-4% with 45 of 45 per-seed wins (sign-test p ~ 2.8e-14, Hodges-Lehmann median -39.6 ms); against a four-shard centralised orchestrator at equal process count the gap stays within +/-1.5% across all nine (pipeline, load) cells. Round-robin completion rate collapses 98.8% -> 22.4% -> 3.3% across arrival rates 5/10/15 pps while the market preserves completion; the advantage decomposes into three Walrasian properties (information completeness, admission control, price discovery). Federation withstands broker death and network partition (completion rate >= 98.7% across 75 cells), and sovereignty enforcement adds no measurable runtime overhead across 60 governance-grid runs. Heterogeneous-domain stressors and cross-site WAN deployment remain future work.
Lauri Lovén, Roberto Morabito, Abhishek Kumar +3
May 19, 2026cs.RO

Closed-Loop Hybrid Digital Twin Platform for Connected and Automated Vehicle Validation

Comprehensive and efficient validation of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) is critical prior to real-world deployment. While simulation-based testing offers scalability, existing approaches often lack seamless integration with real vehicles and field data, limiting their fidelity in capturing dynamic, real-world interactions. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a novel real-time hybrid digital twin platform. Its core innovation lies in the tight coupling of a high-fidelity CARLA-SUMO co-simulation with a physical test site and vehicle via a low-latency Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication link. A custom-developed middleware serves as the critical bridge, synchronizing a real CAV's kinematic state as a shadow vehicle in the simulation and translating virtual control commands into chassis-actuating Controller Area Network (CAN) messages for closed-loop control. Detailed implementation includes using photogrammetry for full-scale asset reconstruction and a cloud-edge collaborative architecture for scalable, multi-user operation. Experimental results demonstrate stable synchronization and effective closed-loop control with low latency, confirming the platform's practicality for multi-scenario CAV verification.
Kanglong Quan, Zhebing Xia, Linfeng Jiang +4
May 13, 2026cs.CV

Bridging the Rural Healthcare Gap: A Cascaded Edge-Cloud Architecture for Automated Retinal Screening

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of preventable blindness, yet rural regions often lack the specialists and infrastructure needed for early detection. Although cloud-based deep learning systems offer high accuracy, they face significant challenges in these settings due to high latency, limited bandwidth, and high data transmission costs. To address these challenges, we propose a two-tier edge-cloud cascade on the public APTOS 2019 Blindness Detection dataset. Tier 1 runs a lightweight MobileNetV3-small model on a local clinic device to perform a binary triage between Referable DR (Classes 2-4) and Non-referable DR (Classes 0-1). Tier 2 runs a RETFoundDINOv2 model in the cloud for ordinal severity grading, but only on the subset of images flagged as referable by Tier 1. On a stratified APTOS test split of 733 images, Tier 1 reaches 98.99% sensitivity and 84.37% specificity at a validation-tuned high-sensitivity threshold. The default cascade forwards 49.52% of test images to Tier 2, reducing cloud calls by 50.48% relative to using a cloud-based model for all images. In the deployed 4-class output space (Class 0-1 / Class 2 / Class 3 / Class 4), the cascade obtains 80.49% accuracy and 0.8167 quadratic weighted kappa; the cloud-only baseline obtains 80.76% accuracy and 0.8184 quadratic weighted kappa. On APTOS, the cascade cuts cloud use by about half with a modest drop in grading performance. Index Terms: Diabetic Retinopathy, Edge-Cloud Cascade, MobileNetV3-small, RETFound-DINOv2, Retinal Screening, tele-ophthalmology
Nishi Doshi, Shrey Shah
May 12, 2026cs.DC

Trade-offs in Decentralized Agentic AI Discovery Across the Compute Continuum

Agentic systems deployed across the compute continuum need discovery mechanisms that remain effective across cloud, edge, and intermittently connected domains. In some emerging agentic architectures, decentralized discovery is already an active design direction, placing DHT-based lookup on the path toward agent directories. This paper studies the trade-offs among major structured-overlay families for agent discovery, comparing Chord, Pastry, and Kademlia as candidate indexing substrates within a shared control-plane framework. Using a benchmark subset centered on a 4096-node stationary comparison and a representative 4096-node churn benchmark, the paper characterizes how discovery reliability, startup behavior, and control-plane overhead vary across these overlays. The goal is to clarify the operating points they expose for agent discovery across edge-to-cloud environments.
Patrizio Dazzi, Emanuele Carlini, Matteo Mordacchini +1
May 10, 2026cs.DC

Adaptive DNN Partitioning and Offloading in Heterogeneous Edge-Cloud Continuum

In recent years, the use of artificial intelligence on resource-constrained IoT devices has grown significantly. However, existing approaches to DNN partitioning and offloading across the edge-cloud continuum typically rely on static methods that ignore runtime dynamics. Furthermore, they are often evaluated in simulated environments rather than on real hardware. To address this gap, we propose a framework that dynamically splits neural network layers across the heterogeneous continuum. The framework profiles the model at startup, measures network link conditions between nodes, and periodically re-evaluates the partition to adapt to environmental changes. We created a physical testbed comprising a Raspberry Pi edge device, a laptop fog, and a high-performance desktop PC as the cloud. We evaluated the framework over three widely adopted convolutional neural networks: VGG16, AlexNet, and MobileNetV2. Our results show that the framework achieves reductions in energy and end-to-end latency of 27.09--35.82% and 6.34--22.92%, respectively, compared to a static partitioning baseline. These findings confirm the superiority of adaptive to static partitioning.
Akuen Akoi Deng, Eimantas Butkus, Alfreds Lapkovskis +1
May 8, 2026eess.SP

Task-Oriented Communication for Human Action Understanding via Edge-Cloud Co-Inference

The expanding application of smart sensing has created a growing demand for the accurate understanding of human action at the network edge. Traditional approaches require massive video data to be transmitted from resource-constrained edge devices to powerful cloud servers, incurring prohibitive uplink bandwidth consumption and unacceptable latency while raising privacy concerns. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose a task-oriented communication framework for human action understanding (TOAU) through edge-cloud collaboration. Our framework utilizes a monocular pose estimator to extract continuous joint coordinates from raw videos, followed by a vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) to convert these coordinates into discrete motion tokens. Consequently, only a compact sequence of codebook indices is transmitted over the network, consuming as few as 9 bits per frame and avoiding privacy leakages. At the cloud server, a lightweight projector aligns these motion tokens with the embedding space of a large vision-language model (VLM) to facilitate complex action understanding, which is trained with an efficient instruction tuning paradigm. Comprehensive evaluations on three benchmarks demonstrate that our TOAU system reduces the transmission payload to approximately 1% and the system latency to around 20% compared to video codec-based solutions, while delivering comparable action understanding accuracy.
Jingyi Liu, Cheng Yuan, Lijun He +2
Apr 29, 2026cs.CR

From Prompt to Physical Actuation: Holistic Threat Modeling of LLM-Enabled Robotic Systems

As large language models are integrated into autonomous robotic systems for task planning and control, compromised inputs or unsafe model outputs can propagate through the planning pipeline to physical-world consequences. Although prior work has studied robotic cybersecurity, adversarial perception attacks, and LLM safety independently, no existing study traces how these threat categories interact and propagate across trust boundaries in a unified architectural model. We address this gap by modeling an LLM-enabled autonomous robot in an edge-cloud architecture as a hierarchical Data Flow Diagram and applying STRIDE-per-interaction analysis across six boundary-crossing interaction points using a three-category taxonomy of Conventional Cyber Threats, Adversarial Threats, and Conversational Threats. The analysis reveals that these categories converge at the same boundary crossings, and we trace three cross-boundary attack chains from external entry points to unsafe physical actuation, each exposing a distinct architectural property: the absence of independent semantic validation between user input and actuator dispatch, cross-modal translation from visual perception to language-model instruction, and unmediated boundary crossing through provider-side tool use. To our knowledge, this is the first DFD-based threat analysis integrating all three threat categories across the full perception-planning-actuation pipeline of an LLM-enabled robotic system.
Neha Nagaraja, Hayretdin Bahsi, Carlo R. da Cunha
Apr 18, 2026cs.RO

Web-Gewu: A Browser-Based Interactive Playground for Robot Reinforcement Learning

With the rapid development of embodied intelligence, robotics education faces a dual challenge: high computational barriers and cumbersome environment configuration. Existing centralized cloud simulation solutions incur substantial GPU and bandwidth costs that preclude large-scale deployment, while pure local computing is severely constrained by learners' hardware limitations. To address these issues, we propose \href{http://47.76.242.88:8080/receiver/index.html}{Web-Gewu}, an interactive robotics education platform built on a WebRTC cloud-edge-client collaborative architecture. The system offloads all physics simulation and reinforcement learning (RL) training to the edge node, while the cloud server acts exclusively as a lightweight signaling relay, enabling extremely low-cost browser-based peer-to-peer (P2P) real-time streaming. Learners can interact with multi-form robots at low end-to-end latency directly in a web browser without any local installation, and simultaneously observe real-time visualization of multi-dimensional monitoring data, including reinforcement learning reward curves. Combined with a predefined robust command communication protocol, Web-Gewu provides a highly scalable, out-of-the-box, and barrier-free teaching infrastructure for embodied intelligence, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for cutting-edge robotics technology.
Kaixuan Chen, Linqi Ye
Apr 17, 2026cs.LG

FedOBP: Federated Optimal Brain Personalization through Cloud-Edge Element-wise Decoupling

Federated Learning (FL) faces challenges from client data heterogeneity and resource-constrained mobile devices, which can degrade model accuracy. Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) addresses this issue by adapting shared global knowledge to local data distributions. A promising approach in PFL is model decoupling, which separates the model into global and personalized parameters, raising the key question of which parameters should be personalized to balance global knowledge sharing and local adaptation. In this paper, we propose a Federated Optimal Brain Personalization (FedOBP) algorithm with a quantile-based thresholding mechanism and introduce an element-wise importance score. This score extends Optimal Brain Damage (OBD) pruning theory by incorporating a federated approximation of the first-order derivative in the Taylor expansion to evaluate the importance of each parameter for personalization. Moreover, we move the metric computation originally performed on clients to the server side, to alleviate the burden on resource-constrained mobile devices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to bridge classical saliency-based pruning theory with federated parameter decoupling, providing a rigorous theoretical justification for selecting personalized parameters based on their sensitivity to local loss landscapes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedOBP outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse datasets and heterogeneity scenarios, while requiring personalization of only a very small number of personalized parameters.
Xingyan Chen, Tian Du, Changqiao Xu +4
Oct 4, 2025cs.SI

Fair Minimum Labeling: Efficient Temporal Network Activations for Reachability and Equity

Balancing resource efficiency and fairness is critical in networked systems that support modern learning applications. We introduce the \emph{Fair Minimum Labeling} (FML) problem: the task of designing a minimum-cost temporal edge activation plan that ensures each group of nodes in a network has sufficient access to a designated target set, according to specified coverage requirements. FML captures key trade-offs in systems where edge activations incur resource costs and equitable access is essential, such as distributed data collection, update dissemination in edge-cloud systems, and fair service restoration in critical infrastructure. We first give a structural characterisation of the single-terminal case, showing that it is equivalent to the rooted Covering Steiner problem. We prove that FML is NP-hard and admits no ((1ε)lnC)((1-ε)\ln |\mathcal{C}|)-approximation for C|\mathcal{C}| groups, already on a star, while for any fixed number of groups it inherits a constant-factor approximation and remains APX-hard. We then present probabilistic approximation algorithms for the two-group, single-terminal case: an algorithm whose tree subroutine is exact, hence optimal on tree-structured networks and O(logV)\mathcal{O}(\log |V|) in expectation on general graphs, together with a faster bicriteria variant whose coverage violation degrades gracefully with the merge depth of the tree computation. For practical scalability, we additionally introduce a graph-native variant based on a shortest-path-tree reduction. Empirical results show that FML enforces group-level fairness, while the graph-native variant substantially improves scalability and achieves competitive activation cost.
Lutz Oettershagen, Othon Michail
Apr 28, 2025cs.DC

Leveraging Neural Graph Compilers in Machine Learning Research for Edge-Cloud Systems

This work presents a comprehensive evaluation of neural network graph compilers across heterogeneous hardware platforms, addressing the critical gap between theoretical optimization techniques and practical deployment scenarios. We demonstrate how vendor-specific optimizations can invalidate relative performance comparisons between architectural archetypes, with performance advantages sometimes completely reversing after compilation. Our systematic analysis reveals that graph compilers exhibit performance patterns highly dependent on both neural architecture and batch sizes. Through fine-grained block-level experimentation, we establish that vendor-specific compilers can leverage repeated patterns in simple architectures, yielding disproportionate throughput gains as model depth increases. We introduce novel metrics to quantify a compiler's ability to mitigate performance friction as batch size increases. Our methodology bridges the gap between academic research and practical deployment by incorporating compiler effects throughout the research process, providing actionable insights for practitioners navigating complex optimization landscapes across heterogeneous hardware environments.
Alireza Furutanpey, Carmen Walser, Philipp Raith +2