An Efficient Edge-Cloud Collaboration System With Foundational Models for Open-Set IoT Applications

Artificial intelligence (AI) models have been widely deployed on edge devices, enabling various IoT applications. However, lightweight on-device AI models on resource-limited edge devices hinder their adaptability to dynamic environments and tasks. Despite the superior generalization capabilities of recently developed Foundation Models (FMs), utilizing their extensive knowledge on the resource-constrained edge platforms remains unexplored. In this work, we introduce DeepEdgeFM, an edge-cloud collaborative system with FMs that enables open-set learning, simultaneously achieving generalizability and efficiency for IoT applications. DeepEdgeFM employs a spatiotemporalaware semantic customization approach that leverages spatial, temporal, and domain-specific knowledge from FMs to continuously customize edge models using unlabeled sensor data in emerging IoT environments. Meanwhile, DeepEdgeFM utilizes a dynamic model switching strategy to selectively query the knowledge of FMs based on sensor-data uncertainty and real-time network fluctuations. We implement DeepEdgeFM on five FMs and multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), covering four types of sensor data modalities. We evaluate DeepEdgeFM on two edge platforms, five public datasets, and two self-collected datasets covering both indoor and outdoor real-world environments. The results show that DeepEdgeFM outperforms state-ofthe- art baselines, achieving up to an 18.6% accuracy gain and a 38.6