# DAT: Dual-Aware Adaptive Transmission for Efficient Multimodal LLM Inference in Edge-Cloud Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05375 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05375/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Visual token pruning and efficiency, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 16 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Visual token pruning and efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/visual-token-pruning-and-efficiency/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12524/) (2025)
- [Video Coding for Machines: A Paradigm of Collaborative Compression and Intelligent Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03569/) (2020)
- [JALAD: Joint Accuracy- and Latency-Aware Deep Structure Decoupling for Edge-Cloud Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10027/) (2018)
- [BOLA: Near-Optimal Bitrate Adaptation for Online Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.06748/) (2016)
- [AppealNet: An Efficient and Highly-Accurate Edge/Cloud Collaborative Architecture for DNN Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04104/) (2021)
- [Device-Cloud Collaborative LLM Inference with Multi-Modal, Multi-Task, Multi-Turn Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11007/) (2025)
- [Toward Edge General Intelligence with Multiple-Large Language Model (Multi-LLM): Architecture, Trust, and Orchestration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00672/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Guidance Semantically Enhanced via Multimodal LLM for Edge-Cloud Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19875/) (2025)
- [MoA-Off: Adaptive Heterogeneous Modality-Aware Offloading with Edge-Cloud Collaboration for Efficient Multimodal LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16995/) (2025)
- [From LLMs to Edge: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning on Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23536/) (2025)
- [AIVD: Adaptive Edge-Cloud Collaboration for Accurate and Efficient Industrial Visual Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04734/) (2026)
- [SAEC: Scene-Aware Enhanced Edge-Cloud Collaborative Industrial Vision Inspection with Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17136/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capability in semantic understanding and visual reasoning, yet their use on continuous video streams in bandwidth-constrained edge-cloud systems incurs prohibitive computation and communication overhead and hinders low-latency alerting and effective visual evidence delivery. To address this challenge, we propose DAT to achieve high-quality semantic generation, low-latency event alerting, and effective visual evidence supplementation. To reduce unnecessary deep reasoning costs, we propose a collaborative small-large model cascade. A lightweight edge-side small model acts as a gating module to filter non-target-event frames and perform object detection, triggering MLLM inference only for suspicious frames. Building on this, we introduce an efficient fine-tuning strategy with visual guidance and semantic prompting, which improves structured event understanding, object detection, and output consistency. To ensure low-latency semantic alerting and effective visual evidence supplementation under bandwidth constraints, we further devise a semantics and bandwidth-aware multi-stream adaptive transmission optimization method. Experimental results show that DAT achieves 98.83% recognition accuracy and 100% output consistency. Under severe congestion, it reduces weighted semantic alert delay by up to 77.5% and delivers 98.33% of visual evidence within 0.5 s, demonstrating the effectiveness of jointly optimizing cascade inference and elastic transmission.