# EC2MoE: Adaptive End-Cloud Pipeline Collaboration Enabling Scalable Mixture-of-Experts Inference

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06024 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06024/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Efficient MoE training and inference systems, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 9 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Efficient MoE training and inference systems](https://mlsanity.com/moe/efficient-moe-training-and-inference-systems/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06066/) (2024)
- [D2MoE: Dual Routing and Dynamic Scheduling for Efficient On-Device MoE-based LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15299/) (2025)
- [Fate: Fast Edge Inference of Mixture-of-Experts Models via Cross-Layer Gate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12224/) (2025)
- [eMoE: Task-aware Memory Efficient Mixture-of-Experts-Based (MoE) Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06823/) (2025)
- [MoE2: Optimizing Collaborative Inference for Edge Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09410/) (2025)
- [The MoE-Empowered Edge LLMs Deployment: Architecture, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08381/) (2025)
- [BrownoutServe: SLO-Aware Inference Serving under Bursty Workloads for MoE-based LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17133/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Adaptive Guidance Semantically Enhanced via Multimodal LLM for Edge-Cloud Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19875/) (2025)
- [SMoE: An Algorithm-System Co-Design for Pushing MoE to the Edge via Expert Substitution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18983/) (2025)
- [Cascadia: Resident 975B MoE Inference on Eleven AI PCs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07219/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm has emerged as a promising solution to scale up model capacity while maintaining inference efficiency. However, deploying MoE models across heterogeneous end-cloud environments poses new challenges in expert scheduling, communication overhead, and resource heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose EC2MoE, an adaptive framework for scalable MoE inference via end-cloud pipeline collaboration. First, we design a hardware-aware lightweight group gate network that enhances expert selection and computational efficiency. By incorporating a hardware-aware local expert selection mechanism, the system adaptively filters candidate experts based on real-time device profiles. A lightweight group gate module then integrates local and global gating outputs to achieve high-quality expert routing with minimal overhead. Second, we develop a pipeline optimization mechanism based on endcloud collaboration to accelerate MoE inference. This includes an encoder-decoder structure based on low-rank compression, which reduces transmission and computation costs. And a route-aware heuristic pipeline scheduling algorithm that dynamically allocates inference stages across devices according to workload and network topology. Extensive experiments show that EC2MoE can increase throughput by 2.2x to 5.1x and reduce end-to-end latency by 53% to 67% while maintaining high accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. It also maintains good scalability under dynamic load and network environments.