arXiv Machine Learning By Atindra Jha, Margaret Li, Jure Leskovec, Percy Liang, Luke Zettlemoyer

Data Scarcity and Model Sparsity: Mixtures-of-Experts Overfit More to Repeated Data

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The paper investigates how data repetition affects Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models compared to dense Transformers. Across models from 80 M to 1 B active parameters, MoEs degrade more quickly as data is repeated, with performance dropping significantly beyond 4× repetition and overtaking dense models only when strong regularization is applied. The study also identifies routing stabilization and expert specialization as key factors in MoE overfitting, and explores regularization techniques that can partially mitigate this issue.

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