# Sense Less, Infer More: Agentic Multimodal Transformers for Edge Medical Intelligence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10404 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10404/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [BranchyNet: Fast Inference via Early Exiting from Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01686/) (2017)
- [FBNet: Hardware-Aware Efficient ConvNet Design via Differentiable Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03443/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04906/) (2021)
- [Deep Predictive Coding Networks for Video Prediction and Unsupervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08104/) (2016)
- [Large-scale Training of Foundation Models for Wearable Biosignals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05409/) (2023)
- [ECG-FM: An Open Electrocardiogram Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05178/) (2024)
- [PaPaGei: Open Foundation Models for Optical Physiological Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20542/) (2024)
- [Skip RNN: Learning to Skip State Updates in Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06834/) (2017)
- [Inter-database validation of a deep learning approach for automatic sleep scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10365/) (2020)
- [DL2: A Deep Learning-driven Scheduler for Deep Learning Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06040/) (2019)
- [Sigma Delta Quantized Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02024/) (2016)
- [Promoting cross-modal representations to improve multimodal foundation models for physiological signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16424/) (2024)
- [Towards Robust Multimodal Physiological Foundation Models: Handling Arbitrary Missing Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19596/) (2025)
- [Active Reinforcement Learning for Personalized Stress Monitoring in Everyday Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00111/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Edge-based multimodal medical monitoring requires models that balance diagnostic accuracy with severe energy constraints. Continuous acquisition of ECG, PPG, EMG, and IMU streams rapidly drains wearable batteries, often limiting operation to under 10 hours, while existing systems overlook the high temporal redundancy present in physiological signals. We introduce Adaptive Multimodal Intelligence (AMI), an end-to-end framework that jointly learns when to sense and how to infer. AMI integrates three components: (1) a lightweight Agentic Modality Controller that uses differentiable Gumbel-Sigmoid gating to dynamically select active sensors based on model confidence and task relevance; (2) a Learned Sigma-Delta Sensing module that applies patch-wise Delta-Sigma operations with learnable thresholds to skip temporally redundant samples; and (3) a Foundation-backed Multimodal Prediction Model built on unimodal foundation encoders and a cross-modal transformer with temporal context, enabling robust fusion even under gated or missing inputs. These components are trained jointly via a multi-objective loss combining classification accuracy, sparsity regularization, cross-modal alignment, and predictive coding. AMI is hardware-aware, supporting dynamic computation graphs and masked operations, leading to real energy and latency savings. Across MHEALTH, HMC Sleep, and WESAD datasets, it reduces sensor usage by 48.8% while improving state-of-the-art accuracy by 1.9% on average.