The paper introduces HOPE, a second‑order pruning method for Mixture‑of‑Experts language models that accounts for cooperative interactions between experts. Unlike first‑order methods such as REAP, HOPE derives an objective that provably bounds pruning error and is shown to outperform baselines across three large MoE models, multiple calibration sets, and diverse benchmarks, especially at high pruning rates and on agentic tasks. The results demonstrate that preserving expert interactions allows aggressive compression with minimal performance loss on complex workloads.
By Alex M. Tseng, Prannay Kaul, Luca Zancato, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto
OMP-MoE is a training‑free compression framework that prunes redundant experts in Mixture‑of‑Experts large language models by framing the problem as sparse signal reconstruction solved with Orthogonal Matching Pursuit. The method greedily selects expert contributions as dictionary atoms to minimize reconstruction error, then optimizes cross‑layer expert allocation via a water‑filling strategy, and finally introduces an adaptive inference mechanism (OMP‑MoE†) that dynamically adjusts expert activation based on energy prediction. Experiments on Qwen, DeepSeek‑V2, GPT‑OSS, and Mixtral MoE show consistent performance gains at 25‑50% pruning ratios, with Qwen3‑30B‑A3B retaining 93.3% of original performance at 50% compression while achieving significant speedups.
By Dezhi Li, Lujun Li, Qiyuan Zhu, Hao Gu, Bei Liu, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
arXiv:2603. 18492v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models increase parameter capacity without proportional per-token computation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making expert pruning important for reducing memory and serving overhead.
By Zongfang Liu, Guangyi Chen, Shengkun Tang, Yifan Shen, Huan Wang, Xin Yuan
Sparsely activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models contain substantial structured redundancy among routed experts, but pruning them without downstream calibration data remains challenging. Existing expert-pruning methods typically rely on a single aggregated importance score, which can bias the retained set toward experts favored by dominant calibration patterns.
arXiv:2607. 01710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparsely activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models contain substantial structured redundancy among routed experts, but pruning them without downstream calibration data remains challenging.
By Yongqin Zeng, Sicheng Pan, Jiale Wang, Hai-tao Zheng, Hong-Gee Kim, Chunxia Ma, XiuTeng Zhou
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models suffer from large parameter counts, which create a significant memory bottleneck. Expert pruning is the most direct approach for reducing this parameter count,...
arXiv:2606. 27866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models scale model ability with sparsely activated experts, making this architecture a standard recipe for modern large models.
By Fan Mo, Yuxuan Han, Geng Zhang, Wangbo Zhao, Yang You
arXiv:2609.25809v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Fine-grained mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures have become a mainstream design for open-weight LLMs, with hundreds of experts and increasingly man...
By Yuanteng Chen, Qiwei Lai, Chen Tianqi, Peisong Wang, Yuantian Shao, Nanxin Zeng, Zhilei Liu, Chuangyi Li, Jing Liu, Jian Cheng
arXiv:2606. 01062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become a leading approach for decoupling parameter count from computational cost in large language models, yet effectively scaling MoE performance remains a challenge.
By Jiarui Feng, Hanqing Zeng, Karish Grover, Ruizhong Qiu, Yinglong Xia, Qiang Zhang, Qifan Wang, Ren Chen, Dongqi Fu, Jiayi Liu, Zhoukai Zhao, Xiangjun Fan, Benyu Zhang, Yixin Chen
arXiv:2604.23036v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Despite MoE models leading many benchmarks, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for the MoE architectures remains difficult because its router layer...
By Haoze He, Xingyuan Ding, Xuan Jiang, Xinkai Zou, Alex Cheng, Yibo Zhao, Juncheng Billy Li, Heather Miller
arXiv:2610.32009v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models reduce computation through sparse activation, but storing their expert parameters remains a major memory bottleneck. We...
By Carson Cary, Yukai Jin, Yihao Huang, Zhankai Ye, Fangyi Li, Ting Hua, Xin Liu, Shangqian Gao
arXiv:2511. 04805v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have shown strong potential in scaling language models efficiently by activating only a small subset of experts per input.
By Yushu Zhao, Zheng Wang, Minjia Zhang