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Tiny but Mighty: A Software-Hardware Co-Design Approach for Efficient Multimodal Inference on Battery-Powered Small Devices

arXiv:2510.05109v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are inherently modular, consisting of vision and audio encoders, projectors, and large language models. Yet, they are almost always executed monolithically, which underutilizes the heterogeneous accelerators (NPUs, GPUs, DSPs) in modern SoCs and leads to high end-to-end latency. In this paper, we present NANOMIND, a hardware--software co-design inference framework for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) that breaks large models into modular ``bricks'' (vision, language, audio, etc.) and maps each to its ideal accelerator. The key insight is that large models can be broken into modular components and scheduled to run on the most appropriate compute units. It performs module-level dynamic offloading across accelerators on unified-memory SoCs. By combining customized hardware design, system-level scheduling, and optimized low-bit computation kernels, we demonstrate our framework with a compact, battery-powered device capable of running LMMs entirely on device. This prototype functions as a self-contained intelligent assistant that requires no network connectivity, while achieving higher throughput and superior power efficiency under strict resource constraints. The design further bypasses CPU bottlenecks and reduces redundant memory usage through token-aware buffer management and module-level coordination. Our system outperforms existing implementations in resource efficiency, cutting energy consumption by 42.3\% and GPU memory usage by 11.2\%. This enables a battery-powered device to run LLaVA-OneVision with a camera for nearly 20.8 hours.

Towards Efficient Federated Learning of Networked Mixture-of-Experts for Mobile Edge Computing

arXiv:2511.01743v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advancements in large artificial intelligence models (LAMs) are driving significant innovations in mobile edge computing within next-generation wireless networks. However, the substantial demands for computational resources and larges-cale training data required to train LAMs conflict with the limited storage and computational capacity of edge devices, posing significant challenges to training and deploying LAMs at the edge. In this work, we introduce the Networked Mixture-of-Experts (NMoE) system, in which clients perform inference collaboratively by distributing tasks to suitable neighbors based on their expertise and aggregate the returned results. For training the NMoE, we propose a federated learning framework that integrates both supervised and self-supervised learning to balance personalization and generalization, while preserving communication efficiency and data privacy. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed NMoE system, providing insights for the NMoE training algorithms.
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