Abstract:Growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) inference services requires scalable infrastructure, yet centralized serving costs rise with demand. We propose a collaborative distributed inference system combining dedicated infrastructure with resources contributed by service users. Dedicated resources provide baseline capacity for maintaining quality of service (QoS), while volunteered resources absorb increasing demand without proportional growth in centralized infrastructure. To capture stochastic and dynamic interactions among users, resources, tasks, and policies, we develop a high-dimensional generative Markov model with structured temporal factorization. The model supports simulation and provides a foundation for task scheduling and QoS-aware resource allocation optimization. We evaluate the system across user populations, resource capacities, and centralized and distributed scheduling policies. Simulations show that distributed scheduling becomes increasingly advantageous as the user population grows, improving request completion and P99 latency while substantially reducing dedicated resource consumption. These results demonstrate the feasibility of user-assisted collaborative inference for infrastructure-efficient autoscaling.
Abstract:We are moving from an information age to the age of intelligence. A decade, or possibly less than that, data will not be the gold anymore rather the derived intelligence out of the data and the information we posses from the edge of the network. Existing Edge Intelligence research focuses mainly on two directions: using AI for edge resource management and deploying lightweight AI models on edge devices. However, existing edge computing research lacks an intelligence-centric framework in which derived intelligence is treated as a first-class, independently manageable entity that can be described, discovered, observed, shared, reused, and dynamically clustered across heterogeneous edge devices and applications. To address these research gaps, we introduced Clustered Edge Intelligence, a visionary intelligence-centric approach. The aim of CEI is to make intelligence a shareable and reusable first-class entity that can be independently represented, discovered, observed, exchanged, and managed across the distributed edge-cloud continuum. We present a three layer CEI architecture and examine enabling technologies and research dimensions, including intelligence inventories, semantic knowledge representation, communication, discoverability, observability, lifecycle automation, clustering mechanisms, marketplaces, interoperability, and standardization.
Abstract:Dynamic traffic variations in Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) lead to drift, which degrades the performance of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) models. Traditional retraining approaches maintain forecasting accuracy but incur high computational cost and may lead to violations of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This work proposes a Q-learning-based adaptive retraining approach that formulates the retraining decision as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), where a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent learns a policy that balances forecasting accuracy and retraining cost. The proposed approach incorporates a multi-expert Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) ensemble to mitigate catastrophic forgetting and improve robustness across diverse traffic conditions. Experimental results show that the proposed approach effectively reduces retraining overhead compared to greedy and random baselines, while maintaining system performance within predefined limits.
Abstract:Emerging distributed computing paradigms, such as the computing continuum, are inherently heterogeneous, stochastic, and complex. Efficiently and effectively utilizing all available resources across the continuum demands a unified formal model of the system. To address this gap, we propose a general framework for modeling distributed computing systems as a generative Markov model, factorized over a structured system state. In our model, the state decomposes into high-dimensional variables, each further factorized over its elements, reflecting the sparse dependency structure inherent to distributed systems. This yields a tractable model enabling simulation, inference, and policy learning over otherwise intractable system states, bridging distributed computing with Markov chain theory and reinforcement learning (RL). We demonstrate our framework through a case study of collaborative AI inference, in which a dedicated server combines resources with those volunteered by service users. Our results show that centralized scheduling becomes a bottleneck at scale, while distributing computation across user devices reduces both latency and server resource consumption. These findings highlight the value of adaptive decision-making in distributed computing systems and demonstrate the framework's utility for modeling, simulation, and optimization.
Abstract:Grey failures in the computing continuum produce ambiguous overlapping symptoms that existing approaches fail to diagnose reliably, either due to a lack of causal awareness or acting under high epistemic uncertainty, risking destructive interventions. This paper presents an uncertainty-aware resilience micro-agent for causal observability (AURORA), a lightweight framework for diagnosing and mitigating grey failures in edge-tier environments. The framework employs parallel micro-agents that integrate the free-energy principle, causal do-calculus, and localized causal state-graphs to support counterfactual root-cause analysis within each fault's Markov blanket. Restricting inference to causally relevant variables reduces computational overhead while preserving diagnostic fidelity. AURORA further introduces a dual-gated execution mechanism that authorizes remediation only when causal confidence is high and predicted epistemic uncertainty is bounded; otherwise, it abstains from local intervention and escalates the diagnostic payload to the fog tier. Our experiments demonstrate that AURORA outperforms baselines, achieving a 0% destructive action rate, while maintaining 62.0% repair accuracy and a 3ms mean time to repair.
Abstract: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.
Abstract:The computational demands of modern AI services are increasingly shifting execution beyond centralized clouds toward a computing continuum spanning edge and end devices. However, the scale, heterogeneity, and cross-layer dependencies of these environments make resilience difficult to maintain. Existing fault-management methods are often too static, fragmented, or heavy to support timely self-healing, especially under noisy logs and edge resource constraints. To address these limitations, this paper presents NeSy-Edge, a neuro-symbolic framework for trustworthy self-healing in the computing continuum. The framework follows an edge-first design, where a resource-constrained edge node performs local perception and reasoning, while a cloud model is invoked only at the final diagnosis stage. Specifically, NeSy-Edge converts raw runtime logs into structured event representations, builds a prior-constrained sparse symbolic causal graph, and integrates causal evidence with historical troubleshooting knowledge for root-cause analysis and recovery recommendation. We evaluate our work on representative Loghub datasets under multiple levels of semantic noise, considering parsing quality, causal reasoning, end-to-end diagnosis, and edge-side resource usage. The results show that NeSy-Edge remains robust even at the highest noise level, achieving up to 75% root-cause analysis accuracy and 65% end-to-end accuracy while operating within about 1500 MB of local memory.
Abstract:Human biological systems sustain life through extraordinary resilience, continually detecting damage, orchestrating targeted responses, and restoring function through self-healing. Inspired by these capabilities, this paper introduces ReCiSt, a bio-inspired agentic self-healing framework designed to achieve resilience in Distributed Computing Continuum Systems (DCCS). Modern DCCS integrate heterogeneous computing resources, ranging from resource-constrained IoT devices to high-performance cloud infrastructures, and their inherent complexity, mobility, and dynamic operating conditions expose them to frequent faults that disrupt service continuity. These challenges underscore the need for scalable, adaptive, and self-regulated resilience strategies. ReCiSt reconstructs the biological phases of Hemostasis, Inflammation, Proliferation, and Remodeling into the computational layers Containment, Diagnosis, Meta-Cognitive, and Knowledge for DCCS. These four layers perform autonomous fault isolation, causal diagnosis, adaptive recovery, and long-term knowledge consolidation through Language Model (LM)-powered agents. These agents interpret heterogeneous logs, infer root causes, refine reasoning pathways, and reconfigure resources with minimal human intervention. The proposed ReCiSt framework is evaluated on public fault datasets using multiple LMs, and no baseline comparison is included due to the scarcity of similar approaches. Nevertheless, our results, evaluated under different LMs, confirm ReCiSt's self-healing capabilities within tens of seconds with minimum of 10% of agent CPU usage. Our results also demonstrated depth of analysis to over come uncertainties and amount of micro-agents invoked to achieve resilience.
Abstract:Failures are the norm in highly complex and heterogeneous devices spanning the distributed computing continuum (DCC), from resource-constrained IoT and edge nodes to high-performance computing systems. Ensuring reliability and global consistency across these layers remains a major challenge, especially for AI-driven workloads requiring real-time, adaptive coordination. This work-in-progress paper introduces a Probabilistic Active Inference Resilience Agent (PAIR-Agent) to achieve resilience in DCC systems. PAIR-Agent performs three core operations: (i) constructing a causal fault graph from device logs, (ii) identifying faults while managing certainties and uncertainties using Markov blankets and the free energy principle, and (iii) autonomously healing issues through active inference. Through continuous monitoring and adaptive reconfiguration, the agent maintains service continuity and stability under diverse failure conditions. Theoretical validations confirm the reliability and effectiveness of the proposed framework.




Abstract:Internet of Things (IoT) systems increasingly operate in environments where devices must respond in real time while managing fluctuating resource constraints, including energy and bandwidth. Yet, current approaches often fall short in addressing scenarios where operational constraints evolve over time. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Budgeted Multi-Armed Bandit framework tailored for IoT applications with dynamic operational limits. Our model introduces a decaying violation budget, which permits limited constraint violations early in the learning process and gradually enforces stricter compliance over time. We present the Budgeted Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm, which adaptively balances performance optimization and compliance with time-varying constraints. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that Budgeted UCB achieves sublinear regret and logarithmic constraint violations over the learning horizon. Extensive simulations in a wireless communication setting show that our approach achieves faster adaptation and better constraint satisfaction than standard online learning methods. These results highlight the framework's potential for building adaptive, resource-aware IoT systems.