MoTE: Mixture of Ternary Experts for Memory-efficient Large Multimodal Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Hongyu, Xu, Jiayu, Wang, Ruiping, Feng, Yan, Zhai, Yitao, Pei, Peng, Cai, Xunliang, Chen, Xilin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Wang, Hongyu
Xu, Jiayu
Wang, Ruiping
Feng, Yan
Zhai, Yitao
Pei, Peng
Cai, Xunliang
Chen, Xilin
author_facet Wang, Hongyu
Xu, Jiayu
Wang, Ruiping
Feng, Yan
Zhai, Yitao
Pei, Peng
Cai, Xunliang
Chen, Xilin
contents Large multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) effectively scale the model size to boost performance while maintaining fixed active parameters. However, previous works primarily utilized full-precision experts during sparse up-cycling. Despite they show superior performance on end tasks, the large amount of experts introduces higher memory footprint, which poses significant challenges for the deployment on edge devices. In this work, we propose MoTE, a scalable and memory-efficient approach to train Mixture-of-Ternary-Experts models from dense checkpoint. Instead of training fewer high-precision experts, we propose to train more low-precision experts during up-cycling. Specifically, we use the pre-trained FFN as a shared expert and train ternary routed experts with parameters in {-1, 0, 1}. Extensive experiments show that our approach has promising scaling trend along model size. MoTE achieves comparable performance to full-precision baseline MoE-LLaVA while offering lower memory footprint. Furthermore, our approach is compatible with post-training quantization methods and the advantage further amplifies when memory-constraint goes lower. Given the same amount of expert memory footprint of 3.4GB and combined with post-training quantization, MoTE outperforms MoE-LLaVA by a gain of 4.3% average accuracy on end tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness and potential for memory-constrained devices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_14435
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MoTE: Mixture of Ternary Experts for Memory-efficient Large Multimodal Models
Wang, Hongyu
Xu, Jiayu
Wang, Ruiping
Feng, Yan
Zhai, Yitao
Pei, Peng
Cai, Xunliang
Chen, Xilin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Large multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) effectively scale the model size to boost performance while maintaining fixed active parameters. However, previous works primarily utilized full-precision experts during sparse up-cycling. Despite they show superior performance on end tasks, the large amount of experts introduces higher memory footprint, which poses significant challenges for the deployment on edge devices. In this work, we propose MoTE, a scalable and memory-efficient approach to train Mixture-of-Ternary-Experts models from dense checkpoint. Instead of training fewer high-precision experts, we propose to train more low-precision experts during up-cycling. Specifically, we use the pre-trained FFN as a shared expert and train ternary routed experts with parameters in {-1, 0, 1}. Extensive experiments show that our approach has promising scaling trend along model size. MoTE achieves comparable performance to full-precision baseline MoE-LLaVA while offering lower memory footprint. Furthermore, our approach is compatible with post-training quantization methods and the advantage further amplifies when memory-constraint goes lower. Given the same amount of expert memory footprint of 3.4GB and combined with post-training quantization, MoTE outperforms MoE-LLaVA by a gain of 4.3% average accuracy on end tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness and potential for memory-constrained devices.
title MoTE: Mixture of Ternary Experts for Memory-efficient Large Multimodal Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14435