arXiv AI By Muhammad Azlan Qazi, Alexandros Iosifidis, Qi Zhang

TRACE: Transformer Residual Activation Codebook Encoding for Communication-efficient Distributed Edge Inference

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The paper introduces TRACE, a framework that embeds a Vector Quantizer at the post‑attention residual of each Transformer layer, enabling exchanged activations to be encoded as compact codebook indices. During inference, receivers recover key/value representations via table lookup, eliminating downstream computation and allowing communication–computation overlap. A hierarchical codebook further permits runtime bitrate adaptation, and experiments on ViT‑Base and ViViT‑B demonstrate up to 1.89% accuracy gain, 1.27× speedup, and a 22,624× reduction in communication overhead compared to uncompressed inference.

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