Multi-Source and Multi-Dimensional Information Fusion in Resource-Constrained Edge Networks

Multi-source semantic information fusion enables edge networks to support global inference using observations collected by distributed terminals. However, limited communication and computation resources restrict semantic uploading, leaving the edge server with incomplete tokens that differ in modality, semantic granularity, arrival time, and channel condition. The value of these tokens also depends on the complementary or redundant information provided by other terminals. In this paper, we propose a multi-source and multi-dimensional semantic information fusion framework that coordinates terminal uploading and edge-side fusion under resource constraints. We develop Hyper-Slot to combine semantic content with available token attributes through iterative token-to-slot assignment and slot-to-token feedback, producing a compact representation for global inference. To encourage useful semantic uploading, we further design a contribution-based incentive mechanism that uses Hyper-Slot assignments to evaluate information coverage and cross-type complementarity. A bi-level Stackelberg-Nash game determines the server reward pool and terminal transmission-quality strategies while accounting for computation and communication energy costs. Experiments on a tri-modal extension of COCO2014 and image-text retrieval on Flickr30K show that Hyper-Slot improves mAP by 3.66 percentage points and RSum by 15.9 points over the strongest evaluated baselines, respectively, while reducing the number of parameters by more than 80% compared with a naive concatenation-based fusion baseline.