Going Beyond the Edge: Distributed Inference of Transformer Models on Ultra-Low-Power Wireless Devices
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Computer Science > Machine Learning
arXiv:2605.15694 (cs)
[Submitted on 15 May 2026]
Title:Going Beyond the Edge: Distributed Inference of Transformer Models on Ultra-Low-Power Wireless Devices
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Abstract:Transformer models are rapidly becoming a cornerstone of modern Internet of Things (IoT) applications, yet their computational and memory demands far exceed the capabilities of a single typical ultra-low-power IoT device. We present CATS, a framework for distributed transformer inference on ultra-low-power wireless devices, enabling multiple devices to collaboratively execute models far larger than what a single device can sustain. At its core, CATS is a communication-aware distributed transformer inference scheme co-designed across transformer partitioning, wireless communication and training. It employs SomeGather, a new pruned communication primitive that selectively broadcasts activation columns to reduce communication bandwidth and RAM usage without sacrificing model accuracy. Building on SomeGather, we design a partitioning method that exploits this primitive for efficient model parallelism. To cope with unreliable wireless communication, CATS employs message-dropout during training, which mimics packet losses and yields models that are robust to message loss during inference. In real-world experiments, we show that CATS brings distributed transformer inference to ultra-low-power wireless devices for the first time, with deployments on up to 16 devices that collaboratively execute transformer models up to 14 times larger than what a single device can run.
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.15694 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2605.15694v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.15694
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Going Beyond the Edge: Distributed Inference of Transformer Models on Ultra-Low-Power Wireless Devices, by Alexander Gr\"afe and 4 other authors
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