HoME: Hierarchy of Multi-Gate Experts for Multi-Task Learning at Kuaishou

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Xu, Cao, Jiangxia, Fu, Zhiyi, Gai, Kun, Zhou, Guorui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wang, Xu
Cao, Jiangxia
Fu, Zhiyi
Gai, Kun
Zhou, Guorui
author_facet Wang, Xu
Cao, Jiangxia
Fu, Zhiyi
Gai, Kun
Zhou, Guorui
contents In this paper, we present the practical problems and the lessons learned at short-video services from Kuaishou. In industry, a widely-used multi-task framework is the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm, which always introduces some shared and specific experts for each task and then uses gate networks to measure related experts' contributions. Although the MoE achieves remarkable improvements, we still observe three anomalies that seriously affect model performances in our iteration: (1) Expert Collapse: We found that experts' output distributions are significantly different, and some experts have over 90% zero activations with ReLU, making it hard for gate networks to assign fair weights to balance experts. (2) Expert Degradation: Ideally, the shared-expert aims to provide predictive information for all tasks simultaneously. Nevertheless, we find that some shared-experts are occupied by only one task, which indicates that shared-experts lost their ability but degenerated into some specific-experts. (3) Expert Underfitting: In our services, we have dozens of behavior tasks that need to be predicted, but we find that some data-sparse prediction tasks tend to ignore their specific-experts and assign large weights to shared-experts. The reason might be that the shared-experts can perceive more gradient updates and knowledge from dense tasks, while specific-experts easily fall into underfitting due to their sparse behaviors. Motivated by those observations, we propose HoME to achieve a simple, efficient and balanced MoE system for multi-task learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_05430
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HoME: Hierarchy of Multi-Gate Experts for Multi-Task Learning at Kuaishou
Wang, Xu
Cao, Jiangxia
Fu, Zhiyi
Gai, Kun
Zhou, Guorui
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
In this paper, we present the practical problems and the lessons learned at short-video services from Kuaishou. In industry, a widely-used multi-task framework is the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm, which always introduces some shared and specific experts for each task and then uses gate networks to measure related experts' contributions. Although the MoE achieves remarkable improvements, we still observe three anomalies that seriously affect model performances in our iteration: (1) Expert Collapse: We found that experts' output distributions are significantly different, and some experts have over 90% zero activations with ReLU, making it hard for gate networks to assign fair weights to balance experts. (2) Expert Degradation: Ideally, the shared-expert aims to provide predictive information for all tasks simultaneously. Nevertheless, we find that some shared-experts are occupied by only one task, which indicates that shared-experts lost their ability but degenerated into some specific-experts. (3) Expert Underfitting: In our services, we have dozens of behavior tasks that need to be predicted, but we find that some data-sparse prediction tasks tend to ignore their specific-experts and assign large weights to shared-experts. The reason might be that the shared-experts can perceive more gradient updates and knowledge from dense tasks, while specific-experts easily fall into underfitting due to their sparse behaviors. Motivated by those observations, we propose HoME to achieve a simple, efficient and balanced MoE system for multi-task learning.
title HoME: Hierarchy of Multi-Gate Experts for Multi-Task Learning at Kuaishou
topic Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05430