TopK-Guided is a training‑free method that improves activation sparsity for large language model inference by combining token‑level sparsity adaptation with block‑level budget allocation that accounts for block sensitivity. It addresses limitations of existing methods like TEAL, which adapts sparsity per token but lacks tight control, and WINA, which enforces a fixed sparsity across all tokens and blocks. Experiments on Llama‑2 and Llama‑3 show that TopK‑Guided consistently yields better perplexity and downstream accuracy while maintaining similar compute costs to WINA, especially at high sparsity levels.
By Mukund Agarwalla, Chih-Jen Lin
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:2608. 02995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) exhibit activation sparsity, wherein only a subset of their neurons is activated for given input tokens.
By Yongwan Jo, Jinyoung Park, Euihyun Lee, Dokyung Song
arXiv:2607. 13099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success but raise growing concerns about content provenance and misuse, motivating the need for reliable watermarking techniques.
By Z Sun, Q Jiang, S Sheng, L Xiang
arXiv:2608.30158v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the de facto standard for adapting large language models (LLMs) to target domains, but it often degrades the model's...
By Kwangmin Ki, Yunhun Nam, Jongheon Jeong, Jaehyung Kim
arXiv:2607. 18280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often compressed through static parameter pruning or dynamic token-level computation, yet aggressive sparsification can trigger rapid performance degradation beyond an essential sparsity boundary.
By Chao Han, Haozhe Hu, Xiaoyu Shen
arXiv:2512. 13996v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts architectures are essential for scaling model capacity efficiently, yet the standard Top-$k$ routing imposes a rigid sparsity pattern that ignores the intrinsic variance in token difficulty and layer-specific computational needs.
By Can Jin, Hongwu Peng, Mingcan Xiang, Qixin Zhang, Xiangchi Yuan, Amit Hasan, Ohi Dibua, Yifan Gong, Yan Kang, Dimitris N. Metaxas
arXiv:2609.15131v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) require substantial computation to process numerous visual tokens across all transformer layers. Most method...
By Yuyao Sun, Tao Deng, Shuang Li, Deqing Wang
arXiv:2607. 08780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models activate only a sparse subset of experts per token, yet consecutive tokens frequently activate different experts -- causing constant weight swapping between slow storage and fast memory on edge devices.
By Ali Kayyam
arXiv:2601. 21461v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern sparse language models typically achieve sparsity through Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers, which dynamically route tokens to dense MLP "experts.
By Albert Tseng, Christopher De Sa
arXiv:2510. 19366v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales model capacity through sparse activation, and is becoming an important architecture for large language models (LLMs).
By Xinfeng Xia, Xiaofeng Hou, Jiacheng Liu, Wenfeng Wang, Mingxuan Zhang, Peng Tang, Chao Li, Minyi Guo
arXiv:2602. 10431v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demand substantial computational and memory resources, posing challenges for efficient deployment.
By Kanghyun Noh, Jinheon Choi, Yulhwa Kim