提出异步稀疏聚合框架,让设备与云端协作生成时大幅减少通信量。
CONCORD: Asynchronous Sparse Aggregation for Device-Cloud RAG under Document Isolation

- 设备端与云端异步协作,仅在必要时请求远程证据。
- 相比基线,吞吐量提升1.66至2.15倍,每令牌通信量降低超90%。
- 适合隐私敏感、带宽受限的边缘智能场景,如医疗或金融应用。
检索增强生成(RAG)通过在推理时引入外部知识,显著提升语言模型性能。随着设备-云协同推理的发展,小型语言模型可部署于终端设备,形成私有文档保留在设备端、公共知识存储于云端的双端隔离设置。由于隐私与政策限制,原始文档无法共享,导致现有方法依赖频繁同步和密集证据传输,在真实延迟与带宽条件下严重限制吞吐量。为此,我们提出CONCORD,一种面向文档隔离场景的异步稀疏聚合框架。CONCORD将云端视为异步到达的证据源而非持续同步的共生成器,引入等待债务控制机制,根据等待回报决定是否继续等待远程参与;同时设计证书引导的最小补全机制,仅请求确定当前贪婪决策所需的远程证据。依赖云端的步骤保持与密集双端聚合相同的贪婪词选择,其余步骤则本地自主完成。在Natural Questions与WikiText-2上的实验表明,CONCORD分别实现1.66倍和2.15倍的端到端吞吐量提升,每令牌通信量降低超过两个数量级,同时维持相近的答案质量与困惑度。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a pivotal technique for improving language models by incorporating external knowledge at inference time. As device-cloud collaborative inference makes it feasible to deploy small language models on edge devices, a new setting arises in which private documents remain on the device and public knowledge resides in the cloud. Privacy and policy constraints often forbid raw document exchange, creating a document-isolated dual-end RAG setting. However, existing methods rely on frequent remote synchronization and dense evidence transfer, limiting throughput under realistic latency and bandwidth conditions. To address this issue, we propose CONCORD, an asynchronous sparse aggregation framework for dual-end RAG under document isolation. CONCORD treats the cloud as an asynchronously arriving evidence source rather than a continuously synchronized co-generator. Specifically, we introduce waiting debt control to decide whether each decoding step should continue waiting for remote participation based on the observed return of waiting. We also design a certificate-guided minimal supplementation mechanism that requests only the remote evidence needed to determine the current greedy decision. Steps that consult the cloud preserve the same greedy token as dense dual-end aggregation, while the remaining steps commit locally without remote evidence. Experiments on Natural Questions and WikiText-2 show that CONCORD improves end-to-end throughput over baselines by $1.66\times$ and $2.15\times$, respectively, while reducing per-token communication by over two orders of magnitude and maintaining comparable answer quality and perplexity.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。