TopoCompress: Topology Aware Token Compression Algorithm for Distributed Edge MoE Inference

Abstract

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models improve capacity with moderate overhead by sparsely activating experts per token. However, deploying MoE across resource-constrained edge servers incurs substantial cross-server communication as experts are distributed across heterogeneous servers. Existing placement methods optimize for raw token traffic, while conventional compression considers semantics but ignores topology-dependent routing costs. Consequently, independent optimization leads to inefficient communication and resource utilization. This paper proposes TopoCompress, a deployment- and topology-aware token compression framework for communication-efficient distributed edge MoE inference. It jointly optimizes token compression, expert deployment/replication, GPU-CPU residency, and collaborative routing to balance cross-server transmission, quality, and resource use. To address the coupling between token-level compression and epoch-level deployment, TopoCompress employs a two-timescale alternating optimization. In the online fast loop, it identifies and compresses low-importance, high-routing-cost tokens and jointly routes surviving expert activations. In the offline slow loop, it updates expert placement, replication, and GPU-CPU residency according to post-compression traffic accumulated during online inference. We establish the feasibility, optimality, convergence, and computational complexity. Simulations demonstrate that TopoCompress effectively reduces cross-server traffic and deployment resource consumption while maintaining controllable inference quality, enabling efficient distributed MoE inference over bandwidth- and resource-constrained edge infrastructures.