Accelerating AIGC Services with Latent Action Diffusion Scheduling in Edge Networks

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has gained significant popularity for creating diverse content. Current AIGC models primarily focus on content quality within a centralized framework, resulting in a high service delay and negative user experiences. However, not only does the workload of an AIGC task depend on the AIGC model's complexity rather than the amount of data, but the large model and its multi-layer encoder structure also result in a huge demand for computational and memory resources. These unique characteristics pose new challenges in its modeling, deployment, and scheduling at edge networks. Thus, we model an offloading problem among edges for providing real AIGC services and propose LAD-TS, a novel Latent Action Diffusion-based Task Scheduling method that orchestrates multiple edge servers for expedited AIGC services. The LAD-TS generates a near-optimal offloading decision by leveraging the diffusion model's conditional generation capability and the reinforcement learning's environment interaction ability, thereby minimizing the service delays under multiple resource constraints. Meanwhile, a latent action diffusion strategy is designed to guide decision generation by utilizing historical action probability, enabling rapid achievement of near-optimal decisions. Furthermore, we develop DEdgeAI, a prototype edge system with a refined AIGC model deployment to implement and evaluate our LAD-TS method. DEdgeAI provides a real AIGC service for users, demonstrating up to 29.18% shorter service delays than the current five representative AIGC platforms. We release our open-source code at https://github.com/ChangfuXu/DEdgeAI/.