Rewiring Experts on the Fly:Continuous Rerouting for Better Online Adaptation in Mixture-of-Expert models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Su, Guinan, Yang, Yanwu, Shen, Li, Yin, Lu, Liu, Shiwei, Geiping, Jonas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912652880510976
author Su, Guinan
Yang, Yanwu
Shen, Li
Yin, Lu
Liu, Shiwei
Geiping, Jonas
author_facet Su, Guinan
Yang, Yanwu
Shen, Li
Yin, Lu
Liu, Shiwei
Geiping, Jonas
contents Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models achieve efficient scaling through sparse expert activation, but often suffer from suboptimal routing decisions due to distribution shifts in deployment. While existing test-time adaptation methods could potentially address these issues, they primarily focus on dense models and require access to external data, limiting their practical applicability to MoE architectures. However, we find that, instead of relying on reference data, we can optimize MoE expert selection on-the-fly based only on input context. As such, we propose \textit{a data-free, online test-time framework} that continuously adapts MoE routing decisions during text generation without external supervision or data. Our method cycles between two phases: During the prefill stage, and later in regular intervals, we optimize the routing decisions of the model using self-supervision based on the already generated sequence. Then, we generate text as normal, maintaining the modified router until the next adaption. We implement this through lightweight additive vectors that only update router logits in selected layers, maintaining computational efficiency while preventing over-adaptation. The experimental results show consistent performance gains on challenging reasoning tasks while maintaining robustness to context shifts. For example, our method achieves a 5.5\% improvement on HumanEval with OLMoE. Furthermore, owing to its plug-and-play property, our method naturally complements existing test-time scaling techniques, e.g., achieving 6\% average gains when incorporated with self-consistency on DeepSeek-V2-Lite.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_14853
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rewiring Experts on the Fly:Continuous Rerouting for Better Online Adaptation in Mixture-of-Expert models
Su, Guinan
Yang, Yanwu
Shen, Li
Yin, Lu
Liu, Shiwei
Geiping, Jonas
Computation and Language
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models achieve efficient scaling through sparse expert activation, but often suffer from suboptimal routing decisions due to distribution shifts in deployment. While existing test-time adaptation methods could potentially address these issues, they primarily focus on dense models and require access to external data, limiting their practical applicability to MoE architectures. However, we find that, instead of relying on reference data, we can optimize MoE expert selection on-the-fly based only on input context. As such, we propose \textit{a data-free, online test-time framework} that continuously adapts MoE routing decisions during text generation without external supervision or data. Our method cycles between two phases: During the prefill stage, and later in regular intervals, we optimize the routing decisions of the model using self-supervision based on the already generated sequence. Then, we generate text as normal, maintaining the modified router until the next adaption. We implement this through lightweight additive vectors that only update router logits in selected layers, maintaining computational efficiency while preventing over-adaptation. The experimental results show consistent performance gains on challenging reasoning tasks while maintaining robustness to context shifts. For example, our method achieves a 5.5\% improvement on HumanEval with OLMoE. Furthermore, owing to its plug-and-play property, our method naturally complements existing test-time scaling techniques, e.g., achieving 6\% average gains when incorporated with self-consistency on DeepSeek-V2-Lite.
title Rewiring Experts on the Fly:Continuous Rerouting for Better Online Adaptation in Mixture-of-Expert models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14853