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:2609.36222v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly expensive to serve. In large-scale serving systems, autoregressive decoding is often bottlenecked by transferrin...
By Ali Abbasi, Justin Shi, Soheil Kolouri
MaskCoFT introduces a masked co‑adaptive fine‑tuning approach for mixture‑of‑experts language models, training both routers and experts jointly with a cross‑entropy loss. A learnable binary mask limits each layer’s Top‑K routing to a subset of experts during fine‑tuning, allowing experts to adapt to the tokens they receive. In simulated GPU cache scenarios, MaskCoFT reduces expert fetches per token by 23.7% for Mixtral‑8x7B and 10.1% for DeepSeek‑V2‑Lite, and lowers inference time per output token by up to 16.4% and 5.5% respectively, while maintaining or improving accuracy across nine benchmarks.
By Junfeng Wu, Zehao Fan, Hadjer Benmeziane, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Liu Liu, Yinan Wang
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
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: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
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 investigates training‑free pruning of Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) models, focusing on how to handle the computation when a router selects a pruned expert. It compares replacement operators from three families on several models (OLMoE, DeepSeek‑V2‑Lite, Moonlight, Granite) while keeping the pruning mask fixed, and introduces a new operator called the tilted novice. The study finds that no single operator consistently dominates, with performance varying by model, pruning level, and evaluation metric, and it proposes a five‑item checklist for reporting results.
By Ezza Ali, Sehrish Bibi, Momina Moetesum, Faisal Shafait
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. 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 introduces RelayMoE, a ring‑based execution model for Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) training that reduces memory usage by avoiding full top‑k expanded dispatch buffers. RelayMoE dynamically chooses between expert and token routing based on communication volume and overlaps data transfer with computation, enabling efficient backward recomputation. Experiments on 30B–57B MoE models show up to a 2× speedup over Megatron‑LM and a 2.02× throughput improvement while extending trainable sequence lengths by up to 2.85×.
By Arnab Kanti Tarafder, Jaume Guasch-Mart\'i, Gokcen Kestor, Jie Ren
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