MoE-Compression: How the Compression Error of Experts Affects the Inference Accuracy of MoE Model?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ma, Songkai, Zhang, Zhaorui, Di, Sheng, Liu, Benben, Yu, Xiaodong, Lu, Xiaoyi, Wang, Dan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ma, Songkai
Zhang, Zhaorui
Di, Sheng
Liu, Benben
Yu, Xiaodong
Lu, Xiaoyi
Wang, Dan
author_facet Ma, Songkai
Zhang, Zhaorui
Di, Sheng
Liu, Benben
Yu, Xiaodong
Lu, Xiaoyi
Wang, Dan
contents With the widespread application of Mixture of Experts (MoE) reasoning models in the field of LLM learning, efficiently serving MoE models under limited GPU memory constraints has emerged as a significant challenge. Offloading the non-activated experts to main memory has been identified as an efficient approach to address such a problem, while it brings the challenges of transferring the expert between the GPU memory and main memory. We need to explore an efficient approach to compress the expert and analyze how the compression error affects the inference performance. To bridge this gap, we propose employing error-bounded lossy compression algorithms (such as SZ3 and CuSZp) to compress non-activated experts, thereby reducing data transfer overhead during MoE inference. We conduct extensive experiments across various benchmarks and present a comprehensive analysis of how compression-induced errors in different experts affect overall inference accuracy. The results indicate that experts in the shallow layers, which are primarily responsible for the attention mechanism and the transformation of input tokens into vector representations, exhibit minimal degradation in inference accuracy when subjected to bounded errors. In contrast, errors in the middle-layer experts, which are central to model reasoning, significantly impair inference accuracy. Interestingly, introducing bounded errors in the deep-layer experts, which are mainly responsible for instruction following and output integration, can sometimes lead to improvements in inference accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_07727
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MoE-Compression: How the Compression Error of Experts Affects the Inference Accuracy of MoE Model?
Ma, Songkai
Zhang, Zhaorui
Di, Sheng
Liu, Benben
Yu, Xiaodong
Lu, Xiaoyi
Wang, Dan
Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
With the widespread application of Mixture of Experts (MoE) reasoning models in the field of LLM learning, efficiently serving MoE models under limited GPU memory constraints has emerged as a significant challenge. Offloading the non-activated experts to main memory has been identified as an efficient approach to address such a problem, while it brings the challenges of transferring the expert between the GPU memory and main memory. We need to explore an efficient approach to compress the expert and analyze how the compression error affects the inference performance. To bridge this gap, we propose employing error-bounded lossy compression algorithms (such as SZ3 and CuSZp) to compress non-activated experts, thereby reducing data transfer overhead during MoE inference. We conduct extensive experiments across various benchmarks and present a comprehensive analysis of how compression-induced errors in different experts affect overall inference accuracy. The results indicate that experts in the shallow layers, which are primarily responsible for the attention mechanism and the transformation of input tokens into vector representations, exhibit minimal degradation in inference accuracy when subjected to bounded errors. In contrast, errors in the middle-layer experts, which are central to model reasoning, significantly impair inference accuracy. Interestingly, introducing bounded errors in the deep-layer experts, which are mainly responsible for instruction following and output integration, can sometimes lead to improvements in inference accuracy.
title MoE-Compression: How the Compression Error of Experts Affects the Inference Accuracy of MoE Model?
topic Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07727