Occult: Optimizing Collaborative Communication across Experts for Accelerated Parallel MoE Training and Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Luo, Shuqing, Li, Pingzhi, Peng, Jie, Wang, Hanrui, Yang, Zhao, Yu, Cao, Cheng, Yu, Chen, Tianlong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Luo, Shuqing
Li, Pingzhi
Peng, Jie
Wang, Hanrui
Yang
Zhao
Yu
Cao
Cheng, Yu
Chen, Tianlong
author_facet Luo, Shuqing
Li, Pingzhi
Peng, Jie
Wang, Hanrui
Yang
Zhao
Yu
Cao
Cheng, Yu
Chen, Tianlong
contents Mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures could achieve impressive computational efficiency with expert parallelism, which relies heavily on all-to-all communication across devices. Unfortunately, such communication overhead typically constitutes a significant portion of the total runtime, hampering the scalability of distributed training and inference for modern MoE models (consuming over $40\%$ runtime in large-scale training). In this paper, we first define collaborative communication to illustrate this intrinsic limitation, and then propose system- and algorithm-level innovations to reduce communication costs. Specifically, given a pair of experts co-activated by one token, we call them "collaborated", which comprises $2$ cases as intra- and inter-collaboration, depending on whether they are kept on the same device. Our pilot investigations reveal that augmenting the proportion of intra-collaboration can accelerate expert parallelism at scale. It motivates us to strategically optimize collaborative communication for accelerated MoE training and inference, dubbed Occult. Our designs are capable of either delivering exact results with reduced communication cost or controllably minimizing the cost with collaboration pruning, materialized by modified fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments on various MoE-LLMs demonstrate that Occult can be faster than popular state-of-the-art inference or training frameworks (more than $1.5\times$ speed up across multiple tasks and models) with comparable or superior quality compared to the standard fine-tuning. Code is available at $\href{https://github.com/UNITES-Lab/Occult}{https://github.com/UNITES-Lab/Occult}$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13345
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Occult: Optimizing Collaborative Communication across Experts for Accelerated Parallel MoE Training and Inference
Luo, Shuqing
Li, Pingzhi
Peng, Jie
Wang, Hanrui
Yang
Zhao
Yu
Cao
Cheng, Yu
Chen, Tianlong
Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures could achieve impressive computational efficiency with expert parallelism, which relies heavily on all-to-all communication across devices. Unfortunately, such communication overhead typically constitutes a significant portion of the total runtime, hampering the scalability of distributed training and inference for modern MoE models (consuming over $40\%$ runtime in large-scale training). In this paper, we first define collaborative communication to illustrate this intrinsic limitation, and then propose system- and algorithm-level innovations to reduce communication costs. Specifically, given a pair of experts co-activated by one token, we call them "collaborated", which comprises $2$ cases as intra- and inter-collaboration, depending on whether they are kept on the same device. Our pilot investigations reveal that augmenting the proportion of intra-collaboration can accelerate expert parallelism at scale. It motivates us to strategically optimize collaborative communication for accelerated MoE training and inference, dubbed Occult. Our designs are capable of either delivering exact results with reduced communication cost or controllably minimizing the cost with collaboration pruning, materialized by modified fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments on various MoE-LLMs demonstrate that Occult can be faster than popular state-of-the-art inference or training frameworks (more than $1.5\times$ speed up across multiple tasks and models) with comparable or superior quality compared to the standard fine-tuning. Code is available at $\href{https://github.com/UNITES-Lab/Occult}{https://github.com/UNITES-Lab/Occult}$.
title Occult: Optimizing Collaborative Communication across Experts for Accelerated Parallel MoE Training and Inference
topic Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13345