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Main Authors: Liu, Boan, Ding, Liang, Shen, Li, Peng, Keqin, Cao, Yu, Cheng, Dazhao, Tao, Dacheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09762
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author Liu, Boan
Ding, Liang
Shen, Li
Peng, Keqin
Cao, Yu
Cheng, Dazhao
Tao, Dacheng
author_facet Liu, Boan
Ding, Liang
Shen, Li
Peng, Keqin
Cao, Yu
Cheng, Dazhao
Tao, Dacheng
contents The Mixture of Experts (MoE) has emerged as a highly successful technique in deep learning, based on the principle of divide-and-conquer to maximize model capacity without significant additional computational cost. Even in the era of large-scale language models (LLMs), MoE continues to play a crucial role, as some researchers have indicated that GPT-4 adopts the MoE structure to ensure diverse inference results. However, MoE is susceptible to performance degeneracy, particularly evident in the issues of imbalance and homogeneous representation among experts. While previous studies have extensively addressed the problem of imbalance, the challenge of homogeneous representation remains unresolved. In this study, we shed light on the homogeneous representation problem, wherein experts in the MoE fail to specialize and lack diversity, leading to frustratingly high similarities in their representations (up to 99\% in a well-performed MoE model). This problem restricts the expressive power of the MoE and, we argue, contradicts its original intention. To tackle this issue, we propose a straightforward yet highly effective solution: OMoE, an orthogonal expert optimizer. Additionally, we introduce an alternating training strategy that encourages each expert to update in a direction orthogonal to the subspace spanned by other experts. Our algorithm facilitates MoE training in two key ways: firstly, it explicitly enhances representation diversity, and secondly, it implicitly fosters interaction between experts during orthogonal weights computation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed optimization algorithm significantly improves the performance of fine-tuning the MoE model on the GLUE benchmark, SuperGLUE benchmark, question-answering task, and name entity recognition tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_09762
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diversifying the Mixture-of-Experts Representation for Language Models with Orthogonal Optimizer
Liu, Boan
Ding, Liang
Shen, Li
Peng, Keqin
Cao, Yu
Cheng, Dazhao
Tao, Dacheng
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The Mixture of Experts (MoE) has emerged as a highly successful technique in deep learning, based on the principle of divide-and-conquer to maximize model capacity without significant additional computational cost. Even in the era of large-scale language models (LLMs), MoE continues to play a crucial role, as some researchers have indicated that GPT-4 adopts the MoE structure to ensure diverse inference results. However, MoE is susceptible to performance degeneracy, particularly evident in the issues of imbalance and homogeneous representation among experts. While previous studies have extensively addressed the problem of imbalance, the challenge of homogeneous representation remains unresolved. In this study, we shed light on the homogeneous representation problem, wherein experts in the MoE fail to specialize and lack diversity, leading to frustratingly high similarities in their representations (up to 99\% in a well-performed MoE model). This problem restricts the expressive power of the MoE and, we argue, contradicts its original intention. To tackle this issue, we propose a straightforward yet highly effective solution: OMoE, an orthogonal expert optimizer. Additionally, we introduce an alternating training strategy that encourages each expert to update in a direction orthogonal to the subspace spanned by other experts. Our algorithm facilitates MoE training in two key ways: firstly, it explicitly enhances representation diversity, and secondly, it implicitly fosters interaction between experts during orthogonal weights computation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed optimization algorithm significantly improves the performance of fine-tuning the MoE model on the GLUE benchmark, SuperGLUE benchmark, question-answering task, and name entity recognition tasks.
title Diversifying the Mixture-of-Experts Representation for Language Models with Orthogonal Optimizer
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09762