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Main Authors: Chowdhury, Mohammed Nowaz Rabbani, Wang, Meng, Maghraoui, Kaoutar El, Wang, Naigang, Chen, Pin-Yu, Carothers, Christopher
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16646
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author Chowdhury, Mohammed Nowaz Rabbani
Wang, Meng
Maghraoui, Kaoutar El
Wang, Naigang
Chen, Pin-Yu
Carothers, Christopher
author_facet Chowdhury, Mohammed Nowaz Rabbani
Wang, Meng
Maghraoui, Kaoutar El
Wang, Naigang
Chen, Pin-Yu
Carothers, Christopher
contents The sparsely gated mixture of experts (MoE) architecture sends different inputs to different subnetworks, i.e., experts, through trainable routers. MoE reduces the training computation significantly for large models, but its deployment can be still memory or computation expensive for some downstream tasks. Model pruning is a popular approach to reduce inference computation, but its application in MoE architecture is largely unexplored. To the best of our knowledge, this paper provides the first provably efficient technique for pruning experts in finetuned MoE models. We theoretically prove that prioritizing the pruning of the experts with a smaller change of the routers l2 norm from the pretrained model guarantees the preservation of test accuracy, while significantly reducing the model size and the computational requirements. Although our theoretical analysis is centered on binary classification tasks on simplified MoE architecture, our expert pruning method is verified on large vision MoE models such as VMoE and E3MoE finetuned on benchmark datasets such as CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_16646
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Provably Effective Method for Pruning Experts in Fine-tuned Sparse Mixture-of-Experts
Chowdhury, Mohammed Nowaz Rabbani
Wang, Meng
Maghraoui, Kaoutar El
Wang, Naigang
Chen, Pin-Yu
Carothers, Christopher
Machine Learning
The sparsely gated mixture of experts (MoE) architecture sends different inputs to different subnetworks, i.e., experts, through trainable routers. MoE reduces the training computation significantly for large models, but its deployment can be still memory or computation expensive for some downstream tasks. Model pruning is a popular approach to reduce inference computation, but its application in MoE architecture is largely unexplored. To the best of our knowledge, this paper provides the first provably efficient technique for pruning experts in finetuned MoE models. We theoretically prove that prioritizing the pruning of the experts with a smaller change of the routers l2 norm from the pretrained model guarantees the preservation of test accuracy, while significantly reducing the model size and the computational requirements. Although our theoretical analysis is centered on binary classification tasks on simplified MoE architecture, our expert pruning method is verified on large vision MoE models such as VMoE and E3MoE finetuned on benchmark datasets such as CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet.
title A Provably Effective Method for Pruning Experts in Fine-tuned Sparse Mixture-of-Experts
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16646