arXiv AI

Cross-Entropy Guided Routing in Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models

The paper introduces two token-error supervision methods for sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) large language models, aligning routing affinities with token-level cross-entropy loss. The first method predicts an error score per expert and uses it to adjust affinities before top‑K selection, while the second directly aligns router affinities to the model’s objective without extra heads or inference changes. Experiments on Granite and ARC‑Challenge show accuracy gains of about 2.3–2.94 percentage points over a parameter‑matched baseline, preserving the native sparse execution budget.

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
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 AI
Jun 2

DAG-MoE: From Simple Mixture to Structural Aggregation in Mixture-of-Experts

arXiv:2606. 01062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become a leading approach for decoupling parameter count from computational cost in large language models, yet effectively scaling MoE performance remains a challenge.

By Jiarui Feng, Hanqing Zeng, Karish Grover, Ruizhong Qiu, Yinglong Xia, Qiang Zhang, Qifan Wang, Ren Chen, Dongqi Fu, Jiayi Liu, Zhoukai Zhao, Xiangjun Fan, Benyu Zhang, Yixin Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 15

A Replicate-and-Quantize Strategy for Plug-and-Play Load Balancing of Sparse Mixture-of-Experts LLMs

arXiv:2602. 19938v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures are increasingly used to scale large language models efficiently, delivering strong accuracy under fixed compute budgets.

By Zijie Liu, Jie Peng, Jinhao Duan, Zirui Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Mingfu Liang, Luke Simon, Xi Liu, Zhaozhuo Xu, Tianlong Chen
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