Mixture of Neuron Experts

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cheng, Runxi, Guan, Yuchen, Ding, Yucheng, Hu, Qingguo, Wei, Yongxian, Yuan, Chun, Shen, Yelong, Chen, Weizhu, Gong, Yeyun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cheng, Runxi
Guan, Yuchen
Ding, Yucheng
Hu, Qingguo
Wei, Yongxian
Yuan, Chun
Shen, Yelong
Chen, Weizhu
Gong, Yeyun
author_facet Cheng, Runxi
Guan, Yuchen
Ding, Yucheng
Hu, Qingguo
Wei, Yongxian
Yuan, Chun
Shen, Yelong
Chen, Weizhu
Gong, Yeyun
contents In this work, we first explore whether the parameters activated by the MoE layer remain highly sparse at inference. We perform a sparsification study on several representative MoE models. For each expert, we rank parameters by the magnitude of their activations from the gate projection and progressively prune the activated subset. Pruning up to 60% of parameters within that subset causes only negligible task-performance degradation; substantial drops occur only after more than 90% are removed. We further decompose experts into neuron-granular MoE and visualize their activation values, finding that most neuron activations are near zero. This observation motivates us to select only high-activation neuron experts during pretraining. Based on this insight, we propose Mixture of Neuron Experts (MoNE). MoNE achieves neuron-granular expert selection by only applying a simple top-k selection within each expert, incurs negligible latency, and requires no additional routing parameters or inter-expert communication. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoNE matches traditional MoE performance while activating only 50% of the MoE-layer parameters, and it consistently outperforms traditional MoE when compared at equal numbers of activated parameters. These results suggest that MoNE is a practical approach to improving parameter utilization and inference efficiency in MoE-like models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_05781
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mixture of Neuron Experts
Cheng, Runxi
Guan, Yuchen
Ding, Yucheng
Hu, Qingguo
Wei, Yongxian
Yuan, Chun
Shen, Yelong
Chen, Weizhu
Gong, Yeyun
Computation and Language
In this work, we first explore whether the parameters activated by the MoE layer remain highly sparse at inference. We perform a sparsification study on several representative MoE models. For each expert, we rank parameters by the magnitude of their activations from the gate projection and progressively prune the activated subset. Pruning up to 60% of parameters within that subset causes only negligible task-performance degradation; substantial drops occur only after more than 90% are removed. We further decompose experts into neuron-granular MoE and visualize their activation values, finding that most neuron activations are near zero. This observation motivates us to select only high-activation neuron experts during pretraining. Based on this insight, we propose Mixture of Neuron Experts (MoNE). MoNE achieves neuron-granular expert selection by only applying a simple top-k selection within each expert, incurs negligible latency, and requires no additional routing parameters or inter-expert communication. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoNE matches traditional MoE performance while activating only 50% of the MoE-layer parameters, and it consistently outperforms traditional MoE when compared at equal numbers of activated parameters. These results suggest that MoNE is a practical approach to improving parameter utilization and inference efficiency in MoE-like models.
title Mixture of Neuron Experts
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05781