Towards inference delivery networks: distributing machine learning with optimality guarantees

International audienceWe present the novel idea of inference delivery networks (IDN), networks of computing nodes that coordinate to satisfy inference requests achieving the best trade-off between latency and accuracy. IDNs bridge the dichotomy between device and cloud execution by integrating inference delivery at the various tiers of the infrastructure continuum (access, edge, regional data center, cloud). We propose a distributed dynamic policy for ML model allocation in an IDN by which each node periodically updates its local set of inference models based on requests observed during the recent past plus limited information exchange with its neighbor nodes. Our policy offers strong performance guarantees in an adversarial setting and shows improvements over greedy heuristics with similar complexity in realistic scenarios