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Main Authors: Min, Chengxi, Wang, Wei, Liu, Yahui, Ye, Weixin, Sangineto, Enver, Wang, Qi, Zhao, Yao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18586
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author Min, Chengxi
Wang, Wei
Liu, Yahui
Ye, Weixin
Sangineto, Enver
Wang, Qi
Zhao, Yao
author_facet Min, Chengxi
Wang, Wei
Liu, Yahui
Ye, Weixin
Sangineto, Enver
Wang, Qi
Zhao, Yao
contents Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have emerged as a promising direction for scaling vision architectures efficiently. Among them, Soft MoE improves training stability by assigning each token to all experts via continuous dispatch weights. However, current designs overlook the semantic structure which is implicitly encoded in these weights, resulting in suboptimal expert routing. In this paper, we discover that dispatch weights in Soft MoE inherently exhibit segmentation-like patterns but are not explicitly aligned with semantic regions. Motivated by this observation, we propose a foreground-guided enhancement strategy. Specifically, we introduce a spatially aware auxiliary loss that encourages expert activation to align with semantic foreground regions. To further reinforce this supervision, we integrate a lightweight LayerScale mechanism that improves information flow and stabilizes optimization in skip connections. Our method necessitates only minor architectural adjustments and can be seamlessly integrated into prevailing Soft MoE frameworks. Comprehensive experiments on ImageNet-1K and multiple smaller-scale classification benchmarks not only showcase consistent performance enhancements but also reveal more interpretable expert routing mechanisms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_18586
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Guiding the Experts: Semantic Priors for Efficient and Focused MoE Routing
Min, Chengxi
Wang, Wei
Liu, Yahui
Ye, Weixin
Sangineto, Enver
Wang, Qi
Zhao, Yao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have emerged as a promising direction for scaling vision architectures efficiently. Among them, Soft MoE improves training stability by assigning each token to all experts via continuous dispatch weights. However, current designs overlook the semantic structure which is implicitly encoded in these weights, resulting in suboptimal expert routing. In this paper, we discover that dispatch weights in Soft MoE inherently exhibit segmentation-like patterns but are not explicitly aligned with semantic regions. Motivated by this observation, we propose a foreground-guided enhancement strategy. Specifically, we introduce a spatially aware auxiliary loss that encourages expert activation to align with semantic foreground regions. To further reinforce this supervision, we integrate a lightweight LayerScale mechanism that improves information flow and stabilizes optimization in skip connections. Our method necessitates only minor architectural adjustments and can be seamlessly integrated into prevailing Soft MoE frameworks. Comprehensive experiments on ImageNet-1K and multiple smaller-scale classification benchmarks not only showcase consistent performance enhancements but also reveal more interpretable expert routing mechanisms.
title Guiding the Experts: Semantic Priors for Efficient and Focused MoE Routing
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18586