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:2607. 16721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The strongest open-weight coding models are mixture-of-experts (MoE) networks: most of their size comes from large pools of "expert" subnetworks, of which only a few act on any token.
By Anik Jha
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models suffer from large parameter counts, which create a significant memory bottleneck. Expert pruning is the most direct approach for reducing this parameter count,...
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
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: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
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: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
arXiv:2609. 04575v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern fine-grained Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models route each token to a small number of experts and renormalize their router probabilities.
By Xing Chen, Hengshuai Yao
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:2505. 17639v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models offer dynamic computation, but are typically deployed as static full-capacity models, missing opportunities for deployment-specific specialization.
By Zehua Pei, Ying Zhang, Hui-Ling Zhen, Tao Yuan, Xianzhi Yu, Zhenhua Dong, Sinno Jialin Pan, Mingxuan Yuan, Bei Yu