Connected cyber-physical systems perform inference based on real-time inputs from multiple data streams. Uncertain communication delays across data streams challenge the temporal flow of the inference process. State-of-the-art (SotA) non-blocking inference methods rely on a reference-modality paradigm, requiring one modality input to be fully received before processing, while depending on costly offline profiling. We propose a novel, neuro-inspired non-blocking inference paradigm that primarily employs adaptive temporal windows of integration (TWIs) to dynamically adjust to stochastic delay patterns across heterogeneous streams while relaxing the reference-modality requirement. Our communication-delay-aware framework achieves robust real-time inference with finer-grained control over the accuracy-latency tradeoff. Experiments on the audio-visual event localization (AVEL) task demonstrate superior adaptability to network dynamics compared to SotA approaches.
@article{arxiv.2511.16225,
title = {Real-Time Inference for Distributed Multimodal Systems under Communication Delay Uncertainty},
author = {Victor Croisfelt and João Henrique Inacio de Souza and Shashi Raj Pandey and Beatriz Soret and Petar Popovski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.16225},
year = {2025}
}