EvoMoE: Expert Evolution in Mixture of Experts for Multimodal Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jing, Linglin, Gao, Yuting, Wang, Zhigang, Lan, Wang, Tang, Yiwen, Wang, Wenhai, Zhang, Kaipeng, Guo, Qingpei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913866477207552
author Jing, Linglin
Gao, Yuting
Wang, Zhigang
Lan, Wang
Tang, Yiwen
Wang, Wenhai
Zhang, Kaipeng
Guo, Qingpei
author_facet Jing, Linglin
Gao, Yuting
Wang, Zhigang
Lan, Wang
Tang, Yiwen
Wang, Wenhai
Zhang, Kaipeng
Guo, Qingpei
contents Recent advancements have shown that the Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach significantly enhances the capacity of large language models (LLMs) and improves performance on downstream tasks. Building on these promising results, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have increasingly adopted MoE techniques. However, existing multi-modal MoE tuning methods typically face two key challenges: expert uniformity and router rigidity. Expert uniformity occurs because MoE experts are often initialized by simply replicating the FFN parameters from LLMs, leading to homogenized expert functions and weakening the intended diversification of the MoE architecture. Meanwhile, router rigidity stems from the prevalent use of static linear routers for expert selection, which fail to distinguish between visual and textual tokens, resulting in similar expert distributions for image and text. To address these limitations, we propose EvoMoE, an innovative MoE tuning framework. EvoMoE introduces a meticulously designed expert initialization strategy that progressively evolves multiple robust experts from a single trainable expert, a process termed expert evolution that specifically targets severe expert homogenization. Furthermore, we introduce the Dynamic Token-aware Router (DTR), a novel routing mechanism that allocates input tokens to appropriate experts based on their modality and intrinsic token values. This dynamic routing is facilitated by hypernetworks, which dynamically generate routing weights tailored for each individual token. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvoMoE significantly outperforms other sparse MLLMs across a variety of multi-modal benchmarks, including MME, MMBench, TextVQA, and POPE. Our results highlight the effectiveness of EvoMoE in enhancing the performance of MLLMs by addressing the critical issues of expert uniformity and router rigidity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23830
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EvoMoE: Expert Evolution in Mixture of Experts for Multimodal Large Language Models
Jing, Linglin
Gao, Yuting
Wang, Zhigang
Lan, Wang
Tang, Yiwen
Wang, Wenhai
Zhang, Kaipeng
Guo, Qingpei
Computation and Language
Recent advancements have shown that the Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach significantly enhances the capacity of large language models (LLMs) and improves performance on downstream tasks. Building on these promising results, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have increasingly adopted MoE techniques. However, existing multi-modal MoE tuning methods typically face two key challenges: expert uniformity and router rigidity. Expert uniformity occurs because MoE experts are often initialized by simply replicating the FFN parameters from LLMs, leading to homogenized expert functions and weakening the intended diversification of the MoE architecture. Meanwhile, router rigidity stems from the prevalent use of static linear routers for expert selection, which fail to distinguish between visual and textual tokens, resulting in similar expert distributions for image and text. To address these limitations, we propose EvoMoE, an innovative MoE tuning framework. EvoMoE introduces a meticulously designed expert initialization strategy that progressively evolves multiple robust experts from a single trainable expert, a process termed expert evolution that specifically targets severe expert homogenization. Furthermore, we introduce the Dynamic Token-aware Router (DTR), a novel routing mechanism that allocates input tokens to appropriate experts based on their modality and intrinsic token values. This dynamic routing is facilitated by hypernetworks, which dynamically generate routing weights tailored for each individual token. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvoMoE significantly outperforms other sparse MLLMs across a variety of multi-modal benchmarks, including MME, MMBench, TextVQA, and POPE. Our results highlight the effectiveness of EvoMoE in enhancing the performance of MLLMs by addressing the critical issues of expert uniformity and router rigidity.
title EvoMoE: Expert Evolution in Mixture of Experts for Multimodal Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23830