MEL: Multi-level Ensemble Learning for Resource-Constrained Environments

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gudipaty, Krishna Praneet, Hanafy, Walid A., Ozkara, Kaan, Liang, Qianlin, Milzman, Jesse, Shenoy, Prashant, Diggavi, Suhas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913911731650560
author Gudipaty, Krishna Praneet
Hanafy, Walid A.
Ozkara, Kaan
Liang, Qianlin
Milzman, Jesse
Shenoy, Prashant
Diggavi, Suhas
author_facet Gudipaty, Krishna Praneet
Hanafy, Walid A.
Ozkara, Kaan
Liang, Qianlin
Milzman, Jesse
Shenoy, Prashant
Diggavi, Suhas
contents AI inference at the edge is becoming increasingly common for low-latency services. However, edge environments are power- and resource-constrained, and susceptible to failures. Conventional failure resilience approaches, such as cloud failover or compressed backups, often compromise latency or accuracy, limiting their effectiveness for critical edge inference services. In this paper, we propose Multi-Level Ensemble Learning (MEL), a new framework for resilient edge inference that simultaneously trains multiple lightweight backup models capable of operating collaboratively, refining each other when multiple servers are available, and independently under failures while maintaining good accuracy. Specifically, we formulate our approach as a multi-objective optimization problem with a loss formulation that inherently encourages diversity among individual models to promote mutually refining representations, while ensuring each model maintains good standalone performance. Empirical evaluations across vision, language, and audio datasets show that MEL provides performance comparable to original architectures while also providing fault tolerance and deployment flexibility across edge platforms. Our results show that our ensemble model, sized at 40\% of the original model, achieves similar performance, while preserving 95.6\% of ensemble accuracy in the case of failures when trained using MEL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_20094
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MEL: Multi-level Ensemble Learning for Resource-Constrained Environments
Gudipaty, Krishna Praneet
Hanafy, Walid A.
Ozkara, Kaan
Liang, Qianlin
Milzman, Jesse
Shenoy, Prashant
Diggavi, Suhas
Machine Learning
AI inference at the edge is becoming increasingly common for low-latency services. However, edge environments are power- and resource-constrained, and susceptible to failures. Conventional failure resilience approaches, such as cloud failover or compressed backups, often compromise latency or accuracy, limiting their effectiveness for critical edge inference services. In this paper, we propose Multi-Level Ensemble Learning (MEL), a new framework for resilient edge inference that simultaneously trains multiple lightweight backup models capable of operating collaboratively, refining each other when multiple servers are available, and independently under failures while maintaining good accuracy. Specifically, we formulate our approach as a multi-objective optimization problem with a loss formulation that inherently encourages diversity among individual models to promote mutually refining representations, while ensuring each model maintains good standalone performance. Empirical evaluations across vision, language, and audio datasets show that MEL provides performance comparable to original architectures while also providing fault tolerance and deployment flexibility across edge platforms. Our results show that our ensemble model, sized at 40\% of the original model, achieves similar performance, while preserving 95.6\% of ensemble accuracy in the case of failures when trained using MEL.
title MEL: Multi-level Ensemble Learning for Resource-Constrained Environments
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20094