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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16248 |
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| _version_ | 1866917156241801216 |
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| author | Hu, Qingguo Lin, Zhenghao Yang, Ziyue Ding, Yucheng Liu, Xiao Jiang, Yuting Wang, Ruizhe Chen, Tianyu Guo, Zhongxin Xiong, Yifan Gao, Rui Qu, Lei Su, Jinsong Cheng, Peng Gong, Yeyun |
| author_facet | Hu, Qingguo Lin, Zhenghao Yang, Ziyue Ding, Yucheng Liu, Xiao Jiang, Yuting Wang, Ruizhe Chen, Tianyu Guo, Zhongxin Xiong, Yifan Gao, Rui Qu, Lei Su, Jinsong Cheng, Peng Gong, Yeyun |
| contents | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has emerged as a promising paradigm for foundation models due to its efficient and powerful scalability. In this work, we present Sigma-MoE-Tiny, an MoE language model that achieves the highest sparsity compared to existing open-source models. Sigma-MoE-Tiny employs fine-grained expert segmentation with up to 96 experts per layer, while activating only one expert for each token, resulting in 20B total parameters with just 0.5B activated. The major challenge introduced by such extreme sparsity lies in expert load balancing. We find that the widely-used load balancing loss tends to become ineffective in the lower layers under this setting. To address this issue, we propose a progressive sparsification schedule aiming to balance expert utilization and training stability. Sigma-MoE-Tiny is pre-trained on a diverse and high-quality corpus, followed by post-training to further unlock its capabilities. The entire training process remains remarkably stable, with no occurrence of irrecoverable loss spikes. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that, despite activating only 0.5B parameters, Sigma-MoE-Tiny achieves top-tier performance among counterparts of comparable or significantly larger scale. In addition, we provide an in-depth discussion of load balancing in highly sparse MoE models, offering insights for advancing sparsity in future MoE architectures.
Project page: https://qghuxmu.github.io/Sigma-MoE-Tiny
Code: https://github.com/microsoft/ltp-megatron-lm |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_16248 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Sigma-MoE-Tiny Technical Report Hu, Qingguo Lin, Zhenghao Yang, Ziyue Ding, Yucheng Liu, Xiao Jiang, Yuting Wang, Ruizhe Chen, Tianyu Guo, Zhongxin Xiong, Yifan Gao, Rui Qu, Lei Su, Jinsong Cheng, Peng Gong, Yeyun Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has emerged as a promising paradigm for foundation models due to its efficient and powerful scalability. In this work, we present Sigma-MoE-Tiny, an MoE language model that achieves the highest sparsity compared to existing open-source models. Sigma-MoE-Tiny employs fine-grained expert segmentation with up to 96 experts per layer, while activating only one expert for each token, resulting in 20B total parameters with just 0.5B activated. The major challenge introduced by such extreme sparsity lies in expert load balancing. We find that the widely-used load balancing loss tends to become ineffective in the lower layers under this setting. To address this issue, we propose a progressive sparsification schedule aiming to balance expert utilization and training stability. Sigma-MoE-Tiny is pre-trained on a diverse and high-quality corpus, followed by post-training to further unlock its capabilities. The entire training process remains remarkably stable, with no occurrence of irrecoverable loss spikes. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that, despite activating only 0.5B parameters, Sigma-MoE-Tiny achieves top-tier performance among counterparts of comparable or significantly larger scale. In addition, we provide an in-depth discussion of load balancing in highly sparse MoE models, offering insights for advancing sparsity in future MoE architectures. Project page: https://qghuxmu.github.io/Sigma-MoE-Tiny Code: https://github.com/microsoft/ltp-megatron-lm |
| title | Sigma-MoE-Tiny Technical Report |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16248 |