# SAEC: Scene-Aware Enhanced Edge-Cloud Collaborative Industrial Vision Inspection with Multimodal LLM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17136 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17136/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13165/) (2023)
- [Mixed supervision for surface-defect detection: from weakly to fully supervised learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06064/) (2021)
- [Contextual Object Detection with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18279/) (2023)
- [PerLLM: Personalized Inference Scheduling with Edge-Cloud Collaboration for Diverse LLM Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14636/) (2024)
- [Chain of Visual Perception: Harnessing Multimodal Large Language Models for Zero-shot Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11273/) (2023)

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

- [Pro-Router: Token-Aware Progressive Model Routing with Adaptive Edge-Cloud Collaboration for Efficient Multimodal LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28726/) (2026)
- [DAT: Dual-Aware Adaptive Transmission for Efficient Multimodal LLM Inference in Edge-Cloud Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05375/) (2026)
- [MHR-Router: Multimodal Heterogeneous Retrieval-Enhanced Adaptive Routing for VLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13278/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Industrial vision inspection requires high accuracy under stringent resource constraints, yet existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off. Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) deliver strong reasoning capabilities but incur prohibitive computational costs, while lightweight edge models often fail on complex cases. In this paper, we present SAEC, a scene-aware enhanced edge-cloud collaborative industrial vision inspection framework with MLLM. The framework is composed of three synergistic components: (1) Efficient MLLM Fine-Tuning for Complex Defect Inspection, (2) Lightweight Multiscale Scene-Complexity Estimation, and (3) Adaptive Edge-Cloud Scheduler. Together, these modules enable robust defect detection by tailoring multimodal reasoning to scene complexity and dynamically balancing computation between edge and cloud resources. Experimental results on MVTec AD and KSDD2 datasets demonstrate that SAEC attains 85.11% and 82.72% accuracy, surpassing Qwen by 22.1% and 20.8%, and LLaVA by 33.3% and 31.6%. It also reduces runtime by up to 22.4% and cuts energy per correct decision by 40%-74%. The code is available at https://github.com/YuHao-Tian/SAEC.