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: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: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
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:2504.04342v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Scaling up model parameters and training data consistently improves the performance of large language models (LLMs), but at the cost of rapidly gro...
By Ayan Sengupta, Siddhant Chaudhary, Tanmoy Chakraborty
arXiv:2606. 15716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models reduce per-token computation through sparse expert activation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making one-shot expert pruning a practical approach for reducing memory usage.
By Zongfang Liu, Jinghui Zhang, Zijian Ma, Guangyi Chen, Xin Yuan
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: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: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.
By Yuhao Zhang
arXiv:2606. 09885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts large language models (LLMs) scale efficiently through sparse activation, yet their deployment is fundamentally constrained by the large static parameter footprint of experts.
By Jiangyang He, Shaolin Zhu, Deyi Xiong
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
arXiv:2606. 18304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale compute efficiently, yet remain expensive to deploy due to their substantial memory footprint and inference overhead.
By Yifu Ding, Jiacheng Wang, Ge Yang, Yongcheng Jing, Jinyang Guo, Xianglong Liu, Dacheng Tao