Continual Instruction Tuning for LLM-ased Management of Continuum Resources

Lanpei Li, Antonino Vaccarella, Vincenzo Lomonaco, Massimo Coppola

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored for resource management across the Cloud-Edge continuum. However, embedding LLMs directly inside latency-sensitive control loops places inference latency, execution jitter, and hallucination risks on the critical path. This study argues for a different use of LLMs: a continually instruction-tuned intent compiler that runs once per management intent or declared context change, above a fast, deterministic tactical controller that handles all low-latency runtime actions. We formulate intent compilation as a continual instruction tuning problem, because management intents arrive sequentially and accumulate while infrastructure and workload contexts drift. Unlike recent LLM-based management frameworks, our design scores the model's outputs by execution, so that catastrophic forgetting can be measured in the executed objective of the underlying controller. On a continuum simulator with a 2B backbone and parameter-efficient adapters, preliminary results show that naive sequential tuning forgets earlier intents in the executed objective, that replay of stored examples nearly prevents this forgetting, and that the tuned compact…