[Submitted on 14 Jul 2026]
Title:HybridInfer: Thermal-Aware Reinforcement-Learning Tier Routing for On-Device, Edge, and Cloud LLM Inference
View a PDF of the paper titled HybridInfer: Thermal-Aware Reinforcement-Learning Tier Routing for On-Device, Edge, and Cloud LLM Inference, by Simran Koul
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Abstract:On-device inference with small language models keeps user data local, works offline, and incurs no per-query cost, so the on-device tier is preferred when it is adequate. It is thermally constrained, however, and I find the constraint is sharper than a slowdown: on a flagship Snapdragon device, sustained on-device generation destabilizes the GPU inference runtime, which crashes or silently wedges after a few consecutive queries. The failure lies in the current toolchain (OpenCL kernel compilation and long-prompt prefill on the mobile GPU), recurs even when the device is cool, and is worst for long generations. Multi-tier routers across on-device, edge, and cloud models can relieve this pressure, but existing routers are thermal-blind and typically evaluated in simulation or on non-mobile hardware. I present HybridInfer, a thermal-aware reinforcement-learning router for a three-tier hierarchy (on-device Llama 3.2 3B, edge Llama 3.1 8B with retrieval, cloud GPT-4o) that uses the phone's thermal headroom and a query-complexity estimate as state and selects a tier by an offline-trained Q-learning policy. Its reward trades quality against latency, cost, and a thermal penalty, plus a locality bonus crediting on-device execution. I show this bonus is a precondition for thermal-aware routing: without it the optimal policy offloads every query. On a real Android benchmark of 210 prompts, the learned router attains significantly higher quality than two hand-tuned heuristics (paired Wilcoxon, p
new | recent | 2026-09
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