Chasing Common Knowledge: Joint Large Model Selection and Pulling in MEC With Parameter Sharing

Pretrained Foundation Models (PFMs) are regarded as a promising accelerator for the development of various Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, and have recently been widely fine-tuned to satisfy users’ personalized inference demands. As many users are attracted to PFM-based AI applications, remote data centers are increasingly unable to solely bear the enormous computational demands and meet the delay requirements of inference requests. Mobile edge computing (MEC) offers a viable solution for delivering low-latency inference services by pulling fine-tuned PFMs from the remote data center to cloudlets in the proximity of users. However, a fine-tuned PFM typically comprises billions of model parameters, which are highly resource-intensive, time-consuming, and cost-prohibitive to execute at the edge. To address this, we investigate a novel joint large model selection and pulling problem in MEC networks. The novelty of our study lies in exploring parameter sharing among fine-tuned PFMs based on their common knowledge. Specifically, we first formulate a Non-Linear Integer Programming (NLIP) for the problem to minimize the total delay of implementing all inference requests. We then transform the NLIP into an equivalent Integer Linear Program (ILP) that is much simpler to solve. We further propose a randomized algorithm with a provable approximation ratio for the problem. We also consider the online version of the problem with uncertain request demand, and develop an online learning algorithm with a bounded regret. The crux of the online algorithm is the adoption of the multi-armed bandit technique with restricted context for dynamic admissions of inference requests. We finally conduct extensive experiments based on real datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms reduce at least 38% in total delays and average costs, while achieving a 5% improvement in average accuracies.