arXiv AI

SHAPE: Coalition-Aware Expert Pruning for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts LLMs

arXiv:2606. 09886v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language models achieve strong quality with low per-token compute, yet their deployment is often limited by the memory wall: the full expert pool must remain resident to support token-dependent routing.

arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

MoRA: MoE Pruning via Router Bias Learning and Expert Approximation

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 AI
Sep 7

When Load-Balancing Goes Too Far: Expert Pruning in Over-Dispersed Mixture-of-Experts Models

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 Machine Learning
Sep 23

You Only Need 2/3 of the Chosen Experts: An Empirical Study of Dynamic Expert Pruning in Fine-Grained MoE LLMs

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 Machine Learning
Aug 27

Ban&Pick: Enhancing Performance and Efficiency of MoE-LLMs via Smarter Routing

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 Machine Learning
4d ago

OMP-MoE: Efficient Expert Pruning for Mixture-of-Experts LLMs via Orthogonal Matching Pursuit

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 AI
Sep 17

Higher-order pruning of experts in mixture-of-experts language models

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 17

AIMER: Calibration-Free Task-Agnostic MoE Expert Pruning

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

IntBMoE: Integrating Block-Level Conditioning into Expert Composition for Full-Participation Mixture-of-Experts

IntBMoE introduces a block‑conditioned mixture‑of‑experts that decouples participation, execution, and materialization by combining dense expert composition with sparse block execution. Each internal layer uses a lightweight hypernetwork to merge all expert bases into a single composed expert, while a router selects only a few blocks per token, keeping compute and memory costs low. Experiments on image classification, language modeling, and sequential recommendation demonstrate consistent performance gains, and the model is deployed in AMap’s generative recommendation system, improving UVCTR by 2.4% in online A/B tests.

By Ran Cheng, Longfei Xu, Zheng Liu, Kaikui Liu, Xiangxiang Chu
arXiv AI
Jun 3

DTop-p MoE: Sparsity-Controlled Dynamic Top-p MoE for Foundation Model Pre-training

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