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
The paper introduces RARE, a router‑agnostic representation engineering framework for Mixture‑of‑Experts language models. RARE projects behavioral perturbations onto the null space of the router matrix to avoid affecting routing, and corrects downstream routing drift. Experiments on six open‑weight MoE models show that RARE improves steering tasks—reducing harmfulness, increasing truthfulness, and enhancing factual editing—while preserving overall model accuracy.
By Zhibo Zhang, Zhen Ouyang, Ling Shi, Kailong Wang
MoRA is a framework for pruning Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models by learning a router bias for each expert and optimizing it with a language‑modeling loss and a routing‑diversity regularizer. The learned biases sharpen routing distributions to identify critical experts and encourage diverse routing preferences. After pruning, MoRA uses an expert approximation mechanism that approximates the outputs of pruned experts with affine transformations of remaining experts, further improving performance.
By Yushuai Sun, Zikun Zhou, Lin Gao, Jun Yu, Wenjie Pei
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: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 RASET, a router‑agnostic safety‑critical expert tuning framework for Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) large language models. RASET identifies a small subset of experts that are responsible for safety enforcement and applies parameter‑efficient tuning only to those experts, preserving the model’s intrinsic routing behavior. Experiments on five open‑weight MoE backbones show that RASET achieves a high safety‑bypass yield, outperforming existing baselines by a significant margin.
By Zhibo Zhang, Yuxi Li, Zhen Ouyang, Ling Shi, Kailong Wang
MASKerade is a new dense‑to‑MoE training method that learns experts as sparse subnetworks of a frozen pretrained feed‑forward network (FFN) using binary masks. A token‑level router selects which masked FFNs to execute, and both the router and mask scores are jointly optimized while the underlying FFN weights remain unchanged. In experiments on five vision‑language benchmarks with Qwen and Gemma backbones, a configuration of four 2:4 experts with top‑2 routing achieved the best performance among compared baselines, demonstrating that mask learning over frozen weights is a practical alternative for constructing token‑routed MoE experts.
By Mingyuan Zhang, Yue Bai, Zhongruo Wang, Yupin Huang, Yiyang Huang, Hailing Wang, Huimin Zeng, Yun Fu
ACE introduces a training‑free, calibration‑free framework for adaptive expert skipping in Mixture‑of‑Experts LLMs. It combines a Global Spectral Proxy that estimates global transformation capacity with a Router‑Conditioned Refinement that builds expert‑specific direction prototypes, enabling the model to skip low‑contribution experts while always keeping the top‑1 expert. Offline computation of expert statistics leaves only lightweight table lookups during inference, and experiments on three MoE‑based LLMs show ACE outperforms static and dynamic baselines, especially at high skipping ratios.
By Zukang Xu, Zhixiong Zhao, Xing Hu, Jiangyong Yu, Houji Wen, Jun Li, Zhe Jiang, Dawei Yang
The paper introduces SEAL, a training-time, parameter‑efficient defense that attaches a plug‑and‑play adapter to the shared expert component of Mixture‑of‑Experts models, and SEAL++, which adds an orthogonal constraint to preserve existing safety subspaces. By leveraging the always‑activated shared expert, SEAL mitigates the structural vulnerability of sparse routing to adversarial manipulation, reducing attack success rates by up to 60% with minimal impact on model capability. The approach is evaluated across six attack scenarios involving harmful prompting, jailbreaks, malicious fine‑tuning, and neuron pruning.
By Qingyu Meng, Yiwei Zha, Jiahuan Pei, Koen Hindriks, Herbert Bos, Min Chen
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: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:2606. 03391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a cost-effective approach for consolidating the capabilities of multiple LLMs without retraining.
By Canbin Huang, Tianyuan Shi, Xiaojun Quan, Jingang Wang, Jianfei Zhang, Qifan Wang