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Main Authors: Sun, Hanchi, Liu, Yixin, Wu, Yonghui, Sun, Lichao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11535
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author Sun, Hanchi
Liu, Yixin
Wu, Yonghui
Sun, Lichao
author_facet Sun, Hanchi
Liu, Yixin
Wu, Yonghui
Sun, Lichao
contents Token-choice Mixture-of-Experts (TC-MoE) routes each token to a fixed number of experts, limiting dynamic computation allocation and requiring auxiliary losses to maintain load balance. We propose Expert Threshold (ET) routing, where each expert maintains an exponential moving average (EMA) threshold estimated from the global token distribution. At both training and inference, each token is independently routed to an expert if its score exceeds the expert's threshold, enabling dynamic computation allocation while achieving load balance without auxiliary losses. This fully causal mechanism eliminates dependence on other tokens in the batch, making it well-suited for autoregressive language modeling. In pretraining experiments scaling to 2.4B parameters on FineWeb-Edu, ET achieves 0.067 lower cross-entropy loss than TC-MoE, equivalent to reaching the same performance with 1.6$\times$ fewer tokens.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_11535
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Expert Threshold Routing for Autoregressive Language Modeling with Dynamic Computation Allocation and Load Balancing
Sun, Hanchi
Liu, Yixin
Wu, Yonghui
Sun, Lichao
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Token-choice Mixture-of-Experts (TC-MoE) routes each token to a fixed number of experts, limiting dynamic computation allocation and requiring auxiliary losses to maintain load balance. We propose Expert Threshold (ET) routing, where each expert maintains an exponential moving average (EMA) threshold estimated from the global token distribution. At both training and inference, each token is independently routed to an expert if its score exceeds the expert's threshold, enabling dynamic computation allocation while achieving load balance without auxiliary losses. This fully causal mechanism eliminates dependence on other tokens in the batch, making it well-suited for autoregressive language modeling. In pretraining experiments scaling to 2.4B parameters on FineWeb-Edu, ET achieves 0.067 lower cross-entropy loss than TC-MoE, equivalent to reaching the same performance with 1.6$\times$ fewer tokens.
title Expert Threshold Routing for Autoregressive Language Modeling with Dynamic Computation Allocation and Load Balancing
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11535