The paper introduces Ban&Pick, a post‑training, plug‑and‑play routing strategy for Sparse Mixture‑of‑Experts large language models. It identifies and reinforces a small group of highly influential experts while dynamically pruning redundant ones, leading to accuracy gains across math, code, and reasoning benchmarks. Experiments on DeepSeek and Qwen3 show notable performance improvements and a 1.25× inference speedup without retraining or architectural changes.
By Yuanteng Chen, Peisong Wang, Yuantian Shao, Nanxin Zeng, Chang Xu, Jian Cheng
arXiv:2602. 06154v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale large language models efficiently by sparsely activating experts, but once an expert is selected, it is executed fully.
By Nurbek Tastan, Stefanos Laskaridis, Karthik Nandakumar, Samuel Horvath
MetaNet is a support‑set controller that predicts, for each layer of a Mixture‑of‑Experts model, an expert‑retention threshold and a bounded routing bias while keeping the backbone, experts, and router frozen. On DeepSeek‑MoE‑16B‑Chat, MetaNet offers a tunable trade‑off between accuracy and expert activation: a conservative setting activates 3.61 experts on average (40% fewer than a fixed k=6) with comparable MMLU accuracy, whereas an aggressive setting activates only 2.28 experts (62% fewer) with a modest accuracy drop. The MMLU‑trained controller also transfers to C‑Eval, activating 2.90 experts on average (52% fewer than fixed k=6) at 0.386 accuracy.
By Rongfeng Wang, Shichao Weng, Zhiqiang Wang, Xinyu Liu, Yang Yi, Peilong Zhou, Hongwei Tang
arXiv:2602. 19938v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures are increasingly used to scale large language models efficiently, delivering strong accuracy under fixed compute budgets.
By Zijie Liu, Jie Peng, Jinhao Duan, Zirui Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Mingfu Liang, Luke Simon, Xi Liu, Zhaozhuo Xu, Tianlong Chen
The paper examines how expert pruning—removing low‑importance experts in Mixture‑of‑Experts models—fails when the router is over‑dispersed, a condition caused by aggressive load‑balancing that spreads tokens nearly uniformly across experts. In this regime, traditional importance signals from router probabilities collapse, making perplexity an unreliable predictor of downstream accuracy; for example, the lowest‑perplexity pruning on gpt‑oss‑20B harms mathematical reasoning while the highest‑perplexity pruning preserves it. To address this, the authors introduce Minimax Expert Score Allocation (MESA), a domain‑aware method that iteratively boosts scores for the most affected domain, achieving minimal worst‑case degradation across domains and outperforming baseline pruning strategies on multiple benchmarks while reducing memory usage.
By Berkcan Kapusuzoglu, Connor Pryor, Sangwoo Cho, Supriyo Chakraborty, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Sambit Sahu, Milind Naphade
arXiv:2608. 10392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models have recently moved beyond routing a fixed number of complete experts.
By Gongli Zhang, Zhulin Liu, C. L. Philip Chen
arXiv:2606. 05538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models achieve strong performance through conditional computation, but their large parameter footprint poses deployment challenges.
By Haoze He, Xinkai Zou, Xuan Jiang, Xingyuan Ding, Ao Qu, Juncheng Billy Li, Heather Miller
arXiv:2607. 26618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated PEFT enables LLMs to collaboratively adapt to decentralized private data without sharing raw examples.
By Donghang Duan, Xu Zheng, Lizong Zhang, Chong Mu, Meng Han
arXiv:2503. 05641v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Combining existing pre-trained LLMs is a promising approach for diverse reasoning tasks.
By Justin Chih-Yao Chen, Sukwon Yun, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Tianlong Chen, Mohit Bansal
The paper introduces SAME (Stabilized Mixture-of-Experts) to address challenges in Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) for large language models. SAME mitigates router drift by decomposing routing dynamics into orthogonal subspaces and updating only task-relevant directions, while preventing expert drift through curvature‑aware scaling that uses historical input covariance without rehearsal. The method also employs adaptive expert activation to freeze selected experts during training, reducing redundant computation and cross‑task interference, and demonstrates state‑of‑the‑art performance on a new long‑task‑sequence benchmark.
By Zhen-Hao Xie, Jun-Tao Tang, Yu-Cheng Shi, Han-Jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan, Da-Wei Zhou
arXiv:2606. 10338v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine unlearning is increasingly important for large language models, yet unlearning in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures remains underexplored.
By Jingyi Xie, Yijun Lin, Yinjiang Xiong, Zhikun Zhang, Sai Li
The paper introduces FedTAR, a task-aware federated fine‑tuning approach for Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) large language models. FedTAR links local client updates to task preferences using routing outputs and Singular Value Decomposition to extract low‑dimensional task coordinates and update directions. It then aggregates updates within and across task clusters, reconstructing the final update to preserve expert specialization and reduce interference, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on four benchmark tasks under non‑IID settings.
By Tingqi Wang, Hongyu Ke, Haoxin Wang, Rafal Angryk, Zhipeng Cai