The escalating complexity of deep neural networks hinders the deployment of federated learning (FL) on resource-constrained devices, especially for multimedia applications such as on-device image classification and speech recognition. Parallel split learning (PSL) has emerged as a promising solution by offloading a substantial portion of the computational workload to the server through layer-wise model partitioning, making it particularly suitable for resource-limited visual and speech intelligence scenarios. However, the absence of client-side aggregation renders PSL sus ceptible to severe training divergence and potential convergence failure under heterogeneous data distributions. To address this challenge, we propose PSL-RGHA, a gradient-aligned PSL framework that employs reference gradient half-space alignment mechanism to mitigate training divergence among client devices. PSL-RGHA comprises two novel components: reference gradient progressive construction (RGPC) and gradient half-space alignment (GHA). Specifically, RGPC evaluates the directional consistency of client gradients and progressively synthesizes a robust reference gradient via Weiszfeld updates, effectively approximating the global descent direction. Then, GHA constrains client gradients within the reference half-space defined by RGPC to mitigate gradient conflicts and rectify local updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PSL-RGHA framework outperforms existing baselines in various settings.
Software agents built on large language models generate traffic unlike human web traffic, yet routers have no class for it and cannot verify a sender's claim to be an agent. This paper proposes the Verifiable Agentic Traffic Class (VATC), which combines a reserved Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) value declaring agent traffic, a router-side classifier that demotes flows contradicting the declaration to a class served after best-effort traffic, and a rate-limited priority queue. VATC was compared with static Differentiated Services (DiffServ), a dedicated class that trusts the marking, and fq_codel, a per-flow fair-queuing scheduler, in two simulators and on a real Linux kernel. VATC matched DiffServ under steady load. In a constructed burst it cut mean agent queuing delay by 98% relative to DiffServ in simulation (assuming an immediate verdict), at a 12% increase in human delay; most of the gain came from the separate class. Under a spoofed flood in the kernel, the rate limit held human latency 11 times below DiffServ's. Without verification, DiffServ and a tightly configured fq_codel gave legitimate agents lower latency than VATC; a live four-feature classifier then demoted all 20 bulk-shaped spoofers and gave agents 0.30 ms, but missed six spoofers that copied the agent pattern. With emulated network delay, a timing feature of the classifier stopped separating agent from human flows. In real agent harnesses on a congested link, router queueing took 13% to 63% of task time, depending on harness and assumed model latency. The traffic was synthetic or sandbox-scale.
One motivation for modular neural networks is to divide computation across components that learn distinct, reusable functions, which could then be recombined to support compositional generalisation. In practice, modular structure alone does not guarantee that such roles develop, and unrestricted communication between modules can undermine any specialisation that does emerge. This raises the question of how modular communication should be organised. The problem can be viewed as an analogue of the perceptual binding problem, where synchrony has been proposed as a mechanism for coordinating distributed representations. We introduce SyncNet, a modular architecture that separates module content from a dynamical phase state: learnt Kuramoto dynamics evolve the phases, while phase alignment determines communication through a shared channel. We evaluate SyncNet on Sort-of-CLEVR for relational reasoning and on SQOOP for systematic generalisation, where lower pair variety demands more recombination at test time. SyncNet gives the best held-out accuracy of the models compared at the three lowest pair varieties, by 5.1 percentage points at the hardest, and is competitive on Sort-of-CLEVR though below the strongest attention baselines. Test-time overrides show that performance depends on phases that evolve: fixed phases cost as much as no addressing at all, and permuting which module holds which region is nearly as damaging. A content-addressed variant trained from scratch nonetheless matches it, so the benefit appears to come from the modular decomposition rather than synchrony itself.
Modern cyber threats commonly unfold as multi-step attacks comprising temporally and causally related phases. Current defenses commonly follow a detect first and correlate later paradigm. Intrusion detection systems classify events independently, while downstream systems reconstruct attack progression from the resulting alerts or audit records. In this context, learning-based detectors learn attack-step dependencies implicitly as statistical regularities in the data and cannot guarantee that their predictions follow the real attack progression. Conversely, correlation systems represent attack relationships explicitly, but apply this knowledge only after the underlying attack observations have been detected. We present DEEPCHRONOS, a neuro-symbolic network intrusion detection system that shifts the paradigm from detect first and correlate later to detection through logical progression. DEEPCHRONOS combines learned flow-level evidence with explicit attack-phase rules, temporal prerequisites, and previously inferred phases, allowing the evolving attack history to inform and constrain each detection decision. Evaluations on DARPA 2000 and AIT-LDS V2 show that DEEPCHRONOS improves macro F1 over purely neural baselines by up to 11.3%, eliminates causal violations under strict temporal constraints, and maintains millisecond-scale inference latency. These results demonstrate that integrating explicit attack progression knowledge into detection produces more accurate and temporally coherent multi-step attack predictions.
User plane function (UPF) selection in 5G networks is an active area of research, with various limited approaches proposed to enhance network efficiency and manage resources effectively. In this paper, we address this gap in the related literature by proposing a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) UPF selection method that utilizes a dynamic, multi-objective reward function and validating it on a real-world 5G emulation platform. The proposed method is based on the large language models' (LLMs) translation of network operator intents and the network data analytics function (NWDAF) abnormality alerts. The experimental results validated in the real-world experimental setup demonstrate that our dynamic DRL solution achieves an effective balance between latency, power consumption, and traffic distribution, outperforming the heuristic baselines and fixed DRL by 16.89%. These findings highlight the real-world applicability of our approach for dynamic, intent-driven UPF selection.
The convergence of decentralized architectures integrating Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Low Power Wide Area Networks is increasingly becoming an integral part of our daily existence. Internet of Things serves as a real-time data conduit enhancing decision making via embedded technology and continuous data exchange. This paper explores the feasibility of Edge Computing as a foundational pillar in this evolving landscape. We experiment under real world, dynamic conditions, evaluate the technological aspects, strategies, process flows and key observations under the broad Edge Computing domain. Research pathways include Multi-access Edge topologies in future 6G networks, model quantization, and satellite-enhanced communication platforms. Additionally, a discussion is added supporting the advanced AI functionalities, including zero-shot learning, multi modal perception, and decentralized generative AI, thereby broadening the scope of intelligent applications across various domains. The significance and research objective of this study are threefold: (1) evaluation of LoRaWAN and satellite IoT communication strategies, (2) analysis of CV workloads on edge hardware and (3) future research directions where Edge Computing can support low-latency, energy-efficient and socially impactful IoT applications. By explicitly addressing these aspects, we aim to establish a clear link between the technological feasibility, ultimately with a practical and socioeconomic relevance.
Image-based remote monitoring over wireless networks faces a trade-off between communication cost and classification reliability. Transmitting complete images is communication-intensive, whereas relying solely on lightweight edge classifiers may compromise accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose Confidence-Driven Adaptation (CDA) for image transmission and classification. An edge device (ED) captures images and applies a lightweight classifier before transmission to a remote server. Based on its classification confidence, the ED selects among three transmission modes with varying levels of information: a short text string reporting its predicted class when confidence is high, a compressed Region of Interest (ROI) at intermediate confidence levels, or an uncompressed ROI when confidence is low. The server accepts the predicted class directly in the first case and performs classification using a more powerful classifier in the other two cases. Numerical evaluations under bandwidth-limited, lossy links and latency-constrained settings demonstrate that CDA achieves high task accuracy at the receiver compared with non-adaptive baselines that transmit only the edge-classifier outcome or the uncompressed ROI.
Cloud-native systems now extend to the network edge and host artificial-intelligence (AI) workloads, including AI agents, but evidence on their reliability and scalability is scattered and uneven. We report a PRISMA 2020 systematic mapping study with an evidence-graded synthesis. Five logged OpenAlex searches on 11 October 2026 covered cloud-native systems, edge AI, agentic AI for operations, reliability of agentic applications and physical AI; 189 records from an earlier exploratory search were added separately. After 301 duplicate removals and an automated peer-review venue rule, 4,611 records were screened against written criteria and a five-level relevance scale. The review includes 1,794 primary studies from 2017-2026 and 95 secondary studies, with every decision released in Dataset S1. Each primary study was assigned to a 13-category taxonomy and graded as simulation, prototype or testbed, production data, production deployment, or not determinable from the abstract. Of 1,003 studies with a determinable level, 66.2% used prototypes or testbeds, 18.0% simulations and 15.8% production data or deployments. A 93-study synthesis core, appraised from indexed abstracts, shows production deployments of cascading-failure prevention, trace- and graph-based root-cause analysis and predictive autoscaling, and production-trace evaluations of cold-start mitigation. Edge reliability and physical AI rely mainly on simulations and testbeds. AI-agent reliability uses tool-grounded diagnosis, explicit safety properties, trace-driven repair and workload-aware scheduling, while empirical studies show that agent frameworks remain fragile. Conclusions are limited to the documented corpus. The principal gaps are production evidence for edge-native systems, shared resilience benchmarks and dependable agentic operations.
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) is often used to decide where Internet of Things (IoT) tasks with different latency limits run in the edge-cloud continuum, yet some methods give every missed task the same penalty and few compare their agents with an optimal policy. This benchmark study builds four offloading systems small enough to solve exactly by dynamic programming and measures reward and learner against the optimum. A bonus for a met limit makes each miss cost its penalty plus the bonus, which shifts the class weights of published per-class rewards. A class-blind penalty stays 65% to 118% above the optimal cost even with a perfect learner, while a corrected per-class penalty comes within 0.13% of the optimum. With a per-class reward, tuned proximal policy optimization (PPO) agents come within 9% to 11% of the optimum in the smallest system, and the corrected one beats a tuned reservation rule in 9 of 10 seeds. In larger systems the agents stay 41% to 76% above the optimum, and a tuned rule beats their mean. Training ten times longer does not close this gap, and a PPO-Lagrangian agent with reachable targets does no better than the per-class reward.
Accurate indoor localization on resource-constrained edge devices remains challenging due to the tension between modeling fidelity and computational efficiency. Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) enables low-cost deployment using existing Wi-Fi infrastructure but is heavily distorted by multipath propagation. Transformer-based solutions mitigate these effects but their quadratic complexity limits real-time edge deployment. Ultra-Wideband (UWB) provides geometrically precise ranging yet requires dedicated infrastructure. We present MambaLoc, a cross-modal distillation framework that improves the accuracy-efficiency balance in CSI-based localization. MambaLoc uses a linear-time Selective State Space Model (Mamba) as a lightweight CSI student, guided during training by a UWB-Transformer teacher. A Feature Alignment Module bridges the representational gap between heterogeneous RF modalities, allowing the CSI model to inherit UWB-derived geometric structure without UWB hardware at inference. A probabilistic Gaussian Mixture regression head models multi-modal spatial ambiguity from multipath effects, avoiding the physically implausible averaging of deterministic regression. Evaluations on a real-world dataset show MambaLoc achieves a median localization error of 0.230 m, reducing error by 22.2% over a standalone Mamba baseline, while requiring 65.1% fewer FLOPs and 58% lower inference latency than Transformer-based approaches.
Collaborative edge large language model (LLM) systems often require repeated prefill computation when task contexts are transferred between agents. Reusing previously computed key--value (KV) caches can eliminate this overhead, but requires KV-cache delivery before the receiving agent begins decoding. Under strict deadlines and unreliable edge links, complete KV cache transfer may be infeasible, making the timely delivery of useful KV information critical. This paper proposes PriorityFEC, a utility-aware KV-cache handoff scheme that combines prioritized source transmission with adaptive loss recovery. PriorityFEC first organizes KV blocks into a utility-aware source queue to prioritize important information. It then employs ACK-sliding Streaming FEC and a lightweight Double Deep Q-Network (Double-DQN) scheduler to dynamically balance source delivery and repair transmission under deadline constraints. We implement PriorityFEC in a distributed edge LLM-serving prototype and evaluate it using Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct across multiple workloads. Experimental results demonstrate that PriorityFEC preserves more useful KV information and achieves substantially higher task accuracy than competing transport schemes, particularly when the deadline is insufficient to deliver the complete KV cache.
Large vision-language-action (VLA) models generalize well but are difficult to run in real time on a robot, and small VLAs that run there fail more often. Remote inference over beyond-5G and 6G networks lets a robot use a large VLA on a server, but querying the server for every action chunk limits the number of robots per server. We propose VLA handover: the robot runs a small VLA (S-VLA) and switches to a large VLA (L-VLA) on a server only when the S-VLA is likely to fail. We formulate the switching as minimizing the request cost under a required success probability and, since this problem cannot be solved directly, propose a heuristic framework that retrains neither VLA. In simulation with SmolVLA and $\pi_{0.5}$ on three of the four LIBERO suites, VLA handover raised the success rate by 11-22 percentage points over the S-VLA alone and sent 49-77% fewer requests than server-only control at a 2-4 percentage-point lower success rate, and its completion time grew less with the network latency.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a standard approach to enhance the reliability of large language model (LLM) outputs by retrieving documents relevant to a query and supplying them in the LLM prompt. Today's RAG systems collect, index, and serve these documents from centralized stores. In practice, however, documents are owned by organizations, devices, and individuals who cannot or will not surrender custody of them to a central party, e.g., because of privacy, copyright or regulatory compliance. Existing modern decentralized retrieval techniques either reintroduce a coordinating authority, or rely on a global data structure that requires continuous network-wide coordination (e.g., DHTs). We present ZeroRAG, a decentralized routing layer for document retrieval in RAG that performs semantic query routing across an overlay of peers with- out global data structures or centralized orchestration. Documents remain with the peers that own them, and each peer keeps only lightweight local state: a bounded set of neighbor advertisements and a cache of recently routed queries. Using these, ZeroRAG steers each query through a best-first walk that progressively rewires the overlay toward semantically relevant neighbors, so recall improves over time as the network self-organizes. We evaluate ZeroRAG using three real-world workloads and two decentralized baselines. We find that ZeroRAG outperforms baselines in terms of recall and required network messages, approaches the recall and LLM answer accuracy of a centralized document store, self-heals after catastrophic peer failures, and scales to 100 000 peers.
Intent-based networking (IBN) promises QoS provisioning in which the network derives the configuration from operator-stated goals. Its first step, translating a natural-language intent into enforceable service-level objectives (SLOs) grounded in a live snapshot of the network state, increasingly relies on large language models (LLMs). These large models add cost and energy to the management loop and typically require multi-GPU, cloud-hosted infrastructure. Can lightweight open LLMs take over this step dependably? We answer this question with a five-dimensional evaluation of ten LLMs with <10B parameters from five families, under four prompting setups, on 716 placement intents. We evaluate translation performance, intent validation, hallucination, energy impact, and robustness to diverse phrasing. The best configurations translate intents with a strict F1 of 0.943 and reject up to 191 of 195 invalid intents. With few-shot reasoning, the strongest models hallucinate unsupported QoS requirements in only about one response in a hundred, whereas the zero-shot setup struggles. A translated intent costs 0.044-0.148 Wh of GPU energy without reasoning, and added energy cost for reasoning pays off for the weaker models. Furthermore, we show that realistic rephrasing lowers the rejection of invalid intents in 15 of 16 configurations for the best-performing models, leaving robust intent validation as a key open challenge for reliable IBN. Our code and data are available: https://github.com/ggck43/intent2slo.
Semantic communication (SemCom) using a relay node is considered, where the relay assists in conveying task-relevant information from a source to a destination, with meaning defined by classification labels. A joint end-to-end design of the source encoder, relay transformation, and destination decoders is developed to optimize both semantic inference accuracy and perceptual reconstruction quality for image data. Relay-assisted schemes are shown to outperform direct transmission, with gains that become more pronounced in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes across different relaying strategies. Alongside these performance benefits, however, a key security vulnerability introduced by the relay is identified, and a Byzantine attack is formulated in which the relay injects structured, learned perturbations into its transmitted signal. The attack operates on intermediate communication representations subject to channel effects, with perturbations generated through a learned mapping applied at test time. It is shown to significantly degrade semantic inference accuracy at the destination. These results reveal a clear trade-off between SemCom gains and security risks in relay-assisted systems, motivating the need for secure relay designs that account for insider threats.
Blockwise distillation methods for architecture search, such as DNA, DONNA, LANA and Puzzle, score each candidate replacement block in isolation and assemble a child network by minimizing the sum of per-block scores. We test this additive assumption on DeiT-S and DeiT-B with seven replacement blocks per layer, seven block-latency budgets from 70% to 40%, three fine-tuning seeds and paired bootstrap confidence intervals. (i) At mild compression the additive integer linear program (ILP) is close to a pairwise integer quadratic program (IQP) that models block interactions, but the post-fine-tuning gap widens sharply between the 60% and 55% budgets: at 55%-40% the ILP trails the IQP by 3.3-16.6 top-1 points on ImageNet-100. (ii) We split the KL additivity error into a metric component, caused by the non-linearity of the KL in summed logit changes and computable from cached single-block logits, and a functional component, the score-level effect of non-additive logit changes. The metric component accounts for most of the error on DeiT-S (59-65%), the functional component for most of it on DeiT-B (73-76%). (iii) A hybrid search ranks moves with the logit-sum predictor and measures only the best ones. It needs no dedicated pair measurements, costs 13-27% of the IQP's pair stage, and on ImageNet-100 significantly outperforms the IQP in 7 of 14 settings, with no significant difference in 6 and a significant loss in 1. Further reducing the pre-fine-tuning KL, or scoring after a short fine-tune, gives no consistent gain. On full ImageNet-1k with 1000-class fine-tuning, the sharp widening between 60% and 55% (5.8-17.5 points at 55%-40%), the model-dependent decomposition and the hybrid's advantage (significantly better than the IQP in 13 of 14 settings, no the other) are reproduced.
Channel sounding in Wi-Fi multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems must balance channel state information (CSI) accuracy against CSI acquisition overhead. Device mobility causes channel aging, while autoregressive CSI prediction introduces errors that accumulate over sounding intervals. However, standardized statistical channel models cannot fully capture the environment-specific channel dynamics encountered in physical artificial intelligence (AI) applications, motivating the use of Sionna-based ray tracing to evaluate CSI prediction under device mobility and evolving propagation geometry. This paper develops a dynamic sounding framework that integrates autoregressive CSI prediction with signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR)-constrained interval selection. A Transformer with rotary position embedding that converts device positions into CSI sequences predicts CSI across multiple subcarriers for beamforming updates between sounding exchanges. We formulate sounding-interval selection as a predicted average-throughput maximization problem under per-stream SINR lower-bound constraints, including CSI acquisition and processing overhead. A prediction-error perturbation analysis provides the SINR bounds, and cumulative-sum enumeration globally solves the finite single-variable problem. Actual SINR feasibility holds whenever the prediction errors satisfy the bounds. Ray-tracing experiments assess channel prediction, trajectory transfer, and autoregressive prediction errors. In single-STA Wi-Fi 7 link-level simulations, predicted-CSI beamforming improves mean goodput by 67.3%, 112.7%, and 119.1% over stale CSI for linear, circular, and cosine trajectories, respectively.
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems powered by large language models (LLMs) execute as autonomous multi-step pipelines that dynamically invoke tools, integrate observations into memory, and iterate until a task is resolved or a resource budget is exhausted. Unlike classical workflows with fixed graphs, the aggregate compute, bandwidth, and end-to-end latency demands of such pipelines are unknown at dispatch time: they emerge at runtime from intermediate observations and stochastic token sampling, yielding heavy-tailed, multi-modal random variables. This unpredictability forces infrastructure orchestrators into a dilemma: under-provisioning risks mid-execution throttling and deadline violations, while over-provisioning wastes scarce edge or cloud capacity. Existing schedulers require a fully known pipeline graph, while edge resource-management methods rely on parametric or stationary demand models, and neither fits the unknown, non-stationary profiles of agentic pipelines. We formalize this setting as the uncertainty-aware agentic orchestration problem, where the goal is to reserve, at dispatch time, compute and bandwidth allocations that cover actual pipeline demands, and to verify that the pipeline can meet its deadline, each with a prescribed probability. We then propose Conformal Reservation for Orchestration (CRO), an online algorithm that translates a sliding window of past execution traces into dispatch-time resource allocations with finite-sample, distribution-free coverage guarantees via conformal prediction. Simulations over heterogeneous task mixes with multi-modal and heavy-tailed profiles show that CRO is the only evaluated method that simultaneously satisfies target probabilistic coverage across all risk levels while, among coverage-feasible methods, attaining the lowest over-reservation, roughly halving the resource waste of the Chebyshev-bound baseline.
Invariants, the relations expected to hold among measured signals of a network, underpin applications from verification to traffic generation, telemetry imputation, and input validation. Yet, writing them by hand demands rare expertise in both formal logic and networking. Testing all possible combinations of telemetry variables statistically is intractable at network scale, while existing automatic tools still require a human-authored grammar of admissible invariants and learn only exact, "hard" rules that break under real-world noise. Our key idea is to use an LLM to inspect variable metadata, classify counter data types, and predict candidate syntactic relationships that form a compact grammar, followed by a deterministic statistical search within that grammar. If the initial grammar fails to recover trusted known invariants on held-out telemetry, Autogram instructs the LLM to iteratively widen the grammar until recovery succeeds. By confining the LLM to grammar induction and re-induction while delegating candidate verification to logical and statistical checks, Autogram turns non-deterministic AI proposals into auditable invariants with formal guarantees within the induced grammar. We design and prototype Autogram and evaluate it on both public and production WAN telemetry, recovering expert-derived invariants with full recall and low false positives. We close with a discussion of open problems on the path toward fully open-ended invariant discovery.
Channel state information (CSI) provides a widely available sensing modality for human and environment perception, but existing CSI sensing models usually rely on task-specific supervised training and require substantial labeled data for each task, device, user, or environment. This limits their scalability in practical deployments where unlabeled CSI is abundant but labeled data is costly to collect. In this paper, we present CSI-JEPA, a self-supervised predictive representation learning framework for label-efficient and transferable Wi-Fi sensing. CSI-JEPA learns reusable temporal-spectral representations from unlabeled CSI samples by predicting latent features of masked channel regions from visible context. To better match the physical structure of CSI, it jointly tokenizes CSI along the time and subcarrier dimensions and introduces a channel variation-aware masking strategy that prioritizes regions with stronger local channel dynamics. After pretraining, the encoder is frozen and adapted to downstream sensing tasks using lightweight task-specific adapters. We evaluate CSI-JEPA on seven real-world Wi-Fi sensing tasks spanning diverse objectives and deployment settings. The results show that CSI-JEPA improves downstream sensing performance over competitive baselines, achieving up to 10.64 percentage points (pp) mean accuracy gain over the supervised Transformer and matched-budget label savings of up to 95.0%. Across unseen tasks, environments, hardware platforms, and CSI organizations, frozen CSI-JEPA improves downstream adaptation by up to 22.92 pp over non-pretrained baselines, demonstrating strong representation transferability.