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: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
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
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: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
arXiv:2510. 02345v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Large Language Models (LLMs) face a trilemma of load imbalance, parameter redundancy, and communication overhead.
By Peijun Zhu, Ning Yang, Baoliang Tian, Jiayu Wei, Weihao Zhang, Haijun Zhang, Pin Lv
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
The paper introduces GRIP, an algorithm‑agnostic framework for machine unlearning in Mixture‑of‑Experts large language models. GRIP enforces hard geometric constraints on router updates, projecting gradient changes into the null space of the retain set’s routing matrix to prevent routing manipulation. Two variants—training‑time stochastic projection and post‑training analytical correction—show significant improvements in routing stability, retain accuracy, and resistance to white‑box adversarial recovery across two MoE models.
By Andy Zhu, Rongzhe Wei, Yupu Gu, Pan Li
arXiv:2604. 00421v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers increase model capacity by activating only a small subset of experts per token, and typically rely on a learned router to map hidden states to expert assignments.
By Jama Hussein Mohamud, Drew Wagner, Mirco Ravanelli
arXiv:2602. 06154v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale large language models efficiently by sparsely activating experts, but once an expert is selected, it is executed fully.
By Nurbek Tastan, Stefanos Laskaridis, Karthik Nandakumar, Samuel Horvath
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. 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