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EMMI: Edge Multi-Modal Intelligence for Communication-Efficient MLLM Inference via Fused Representation Compression

arxiv.org/abs/2609.11058

Updated 15 min ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294FNZ2EGRDJ67QARD9K24S

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 15 min ago
arXiv
2609.11058
T1 · 15 min ago
Category
cs.LG
T1 · 15 min ago

Abstract

Recent advances in multimodal large language mod- els (MLLMs) have opened new opportunities for edge intelligence by enabling reasoning across heterogeneous sensor modalities, such as vision, text, and telemetry data. However, deploying these capabilities on resource-constrained edge platforms remains challenging due to the substantial computational, memory, and communication demands of modern MLLMs. Rather than transmitting raw sensor observations or partitioning neural networks at intermediate layers, Edge Multi-Modal Intelligence (EMMI) communicates a compact representation between edge devices and server resources, enabling communication-efficient edge MLLM inference. To achieve this, EMMI performs modality-specific encoding, cross-modal representation fusion, and learned compression at the edge, transmitting only a compact latent representation to server-side resources for high-capacity MLLM reasoning. This representation-centric design reduces communication overhead, preserves local data privacy, and provides a fixed-size interface between heterogeneous edge devices and server-side MLLMs. Evaluation on a representative multimodal benchmark demonstrates that EMMI can reduce the communication payload by 32x while maintaining comparable downstream accuracy, resulting in up to a 3.4x reduction in estimated end-to-end inference latency under bandwidth-constrained edge conditions.

Authors 2

Motahare Mounesan, Irfan Khan

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 15 min agohigh

Arxiv announce type
new

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 15 min agohigh

arXiv id
2609.11058

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 15 min agohigh

Categories
cs.LG, cs.DC

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 15 min agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 15 min agohigh

Primary category
cs.LG

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 15 min agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 15 min agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

15 min ago

Conflicts

None