arXiv Machine Learning By Yifan Yang, Hanling Yi, Dongquan Yang, Feng Lin, Rong Xiao, Aijun Li, Xiaotian Yu

SPARE: Sparsity Allocation via Routing Entropy for Efficient MoEs

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SPARE (Sparsity Allocation via Routing Entropy) is a training‑free, selector‑agnostic method that determines how many experts to prune from each layer of a Mixture‑of‑Experts model by analyzing the routing entropy of tokens on calibration data. By pruning layers with more diffuse routing more aggressively, SPARE improves accuracy over uniform pruning across several large models, achieving notable gains at high pruning ratios. The approach is supported by a perturbation bound under random pruning and controlled experiments that demonstrate its effectiveness on Mixtral, Qwen3, and DeepSeek models.

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