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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

Adaptive Fine-Tuning Scheduler for Multi-Tenant Edge LLM via Convergence-Aware Bandits

Yandi Li, Jianxiong Guo, Yupeng Li, Zhiqing Tang, Tian Wang, Weijia Jia

Abstract

Personalizing Large Language Models (LLMs) directly on local edge servers is becoming increasingly important for privacy-preserving and context-aware applications. However, this potential is bottlenecked by hardware resources: limited GPU memory permits only a fixed number of train-ready LoRA adapters, while compute constraints enforce sequential fine-tuning updates. This creates a critical challenge: scheduling scarce update opportunities across a dynamic stream of resident tenants to improve overall model quality and scheduling stability. Crucially, standard Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms fail to distinguish between low-potential tenant streams and fully saturated adapters, leading to wasteful exploration on tasks that offer little further gain. To address this, we propose WCA-UCB (Windowed Convergence-Aware UCB), a scheduler designed for this piecewise-converging non-stationary environment. By formally modeling fine-tuning as a slot-constrained bandit problem with piecewise-converging rewards, WCA-UCB detects when an adapter has saturated to pause its training and resets stale statistics after tenant replacement or harmful drift. We prove a dynamic regret bound of and validate the system on an edge-like single-GPU LoRA prototype running Qwen2.5-1.5B. Results demonstrate that WCA-UCB reduces model perplexity by % to % and uses up to fewer training-target switches than strong non-stationary baselines. These results highlight the necessity of convergence-aware scheduling for scalable local LLM personalization.

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