MoSE: Mixture of Slimmable Experts for Efficient and Adaptive Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Tastan, Nurbek, Laskaridis, Stefanos, Nandakumar, Karthik, Horvath, Samuel
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Tastan, Nurbek
Laskaridis, Stefanos
Nandakumar, Karthik
Horvath, Samuel
author_facet Tastan, Nurbek
Laskaridis, Stefanos
Nandakumar, Karthik
Horvath, Samuel
contents Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale large language models efficiently by sparsely activating experts, but once an expert is selected, it is executed fully. Hence, the trade-off between accuracy and computation in an MoE model typically exhibits large discontinuities. We propose Mixture of Slimmable Experts (MoSE), an MoE architecture in which each expert has a nested, slimmable structure that can be executed at variable widths. This enables conditional computation not only over which experts are activated, but also over how much of each expert is utilized. Consequently, a single pretrained MoSE model can support a more continuous spectrum of accuracy-compute trade-offs at inference time. We present a simple and stable training recipe for slimmable experts under sparse routing, combining multi-width training with standard MoE objectives. During inference, we explore strategies for runtime width determination, including a lightweight test-time training mechanism that learns how to map router confidence/probabilities to expert widths under a fixed budget. Experiments on GPT models trained on OpenWebText demonstrate that MoSE matches or improves upon standard MoE at full width and consistently shifts the Pareto frontier for accuracy vs. cost, achieving comparable performance with significantly fewer FLOPs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_06154
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MoSE: Mixture of Slimmable Experts for Efficient and Adaptive Language Models
Tastan, Nurbek
Laskaridis, Stefanos
Nandakumar, Karthik
Horvath, Samuel
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale large language models efficiently by sparsely activating experts, but once an expert is selected, it is executed fully. Hence, the trade-off between accuracy and computation in an MoE model typically exhibits large discontinuities. We propose Mixture of Slimmable Experts (MoSE), an MoE architecture in which each expert has a nested, slimmable structure that can be executed at variable widths. This enables conditional computation not only over which experts are activated, but also over how much of each expert is utilized. Consequently, a single pretrained MoSE model can support a more continuous spectrum of accuracy-compute trade-offs at inference time. We present a simple and stable training recipe for slimmable experts under sparse routing, combining multi-width training with standard MoE objectives. During inference, we explore strategies for runtime width determination, including a lightweight test-time training mechanism that learns how to map router confidence/probabilities to expert widths under a fixed budget. Experiments on GPT models trained on OpenWebText demonstrate that MoSE matches or improves upon standard MoE at full width and consistently shifts the Pareto frontier for accuracy vs. cost, achieving comparable performance with significantly fewer FLOPs.
title MoSE: Mixture of Slimmable Experts for Efficient and Adaptive Language Models
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06154