CompeteSMoE -- Statistically Guaranteed Mixture of Experts Training via Competition

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nguyen, Nam V., Nguyen, Huy, Pham, Quang, Nguyen, Van, Ramasamy, Savitha, Ho, Nhat
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nguyen, Nam V.
Nguyen, Huy
Pham, Quang
Nguyen, Van
Ramasamy, Savitha
Ho, Nhat
author_facet Nguyen, Nam V.
Nguyen, Huy
Pham, Quang
Nguyen, Van
Ramasamy, Savitha
Ho, Nhat
contents Sparse mixture of experts (SMoE) offers an appealing solution to scale up the model complexity beyond the mean of increasing the network's depth or width. However, we argue that effective SMoE training remains challenging because of the suboptimal routing process where experts that perform computation do not directly contribute to the routing process. In this work, we propose competition, a novel mechanism to route tokens to experts with the highest neural response. Theoretically, we show that the competition mechanism enjoys a better sample efficiency than the traditional softmax routing. Furthermore, we develop CompeteSMoE, a simple yet effective algorithm to train large language models by deploying a router to learn the competition policy, thus enjoying strong performances at a low training overhead. Our extensive empirical evaluations on both the visual instruction tuning and language pre-training tasks demonstrate the efficacy, robustness, and scalability of CompeteSMoE compared to state-of-the-art SMoE strategies. We have made the implementation available at: https://github.com/Fsoft-AIC/CompeteSMoE. This work is an improved version of the previous study at arXiv:2402.02526
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13380
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CompeteSMoE -- Statistically Guaranteed Mixture of Experts Training via Competition
Nguyen, Nam V.
Nguyen, Huy
Pham, Quang
Nguyen, Van
Ramasamy, Savitha
Ho, Nhat
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Sparse mixture of experts (SMoE) offers an appealing solution to scale up the model complexity beyond the mean of increasing the network's depth or width. However, we argue that effective SMoE training remains challenging because of the suboptimal routing process where experts that perform computation do not directly contribute to the routing process. In this work, we propose competition, a novel mechanism to route tokens to experts with the highest neural response. Theoretically, we show that the competition mechanism enjoys a better sample efficiency than the traditional softmax routing. Furthermore, we develop CompeteSMoE, a simple yet effective algorithm to train large language models by deploying a router to learn the competition policy, thus enjoying strong performances at a low training overhead. Our extensive empirical evaluations on both the visual instruction tuning and language pre-training tasks demonstrate the efficacy, robustness, and scalability of CompeteSMoE compared to state-of-the-art SMoE strategies. We have made the implementation available at: https://github.com/Fsoft-AIC/CompeteSMoE. This work is an improved version of the previous study at arXiv:2402.02526
title CompeteSMoE -- Statistically Guaranteed Mixture of Experts Training via Competition
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13380