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. 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:2608. 08853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) routers commonly use the same scores both to select experts and to weight their already-computed outputs.
By Zongfei Li
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
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable model scaling while maintaining low inference-time compute by activating only a subset of experts per token. However, conventional routing relies on a fixed top-k selection, forcing the model to spend the same compute regardless of how many experts are relevant.
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: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
arXiv:2608. 04401v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable model scaling while maintaining low inference-time compute by activating only a subset of experts per token.
By Robin Pan, Raymond Liu, Daniel Fang, Adelina Andrei, Rosa Wu
arXiv:2609.13058v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to post-training of large language models. Recent advances in RL for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models hav...
By Hongyi He, Zhenghao Lin, Xiao Liu, Peng Cheng, Yan Lu, Yeyun Gong
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
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:2608. 12146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models for reinforcement learning (RL) couples two load-balancing problems: sequence composition determines dense attention work in each data-parallel microbatch, while token routing determines sparse expert work on expert-parallel ranks.
By Yibo Shen, Xudong Han, Xiaowei Zhu, Gen Li, Zhenxuan Pan