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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18492 |
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Table of Contents:
- Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models increase parameter capacity without proportional per-token compute, but the deployment still requires storing all experts, making expert pruning important for reducing memory and serving overhead. Existing task-agnostic expert pruning methods are typically calibration-dependent: they estimate expert importance from routing or activation statistics on a calibration set, which makes pruning outcomes sensitive to the choice of calibration set and adds substantial preprocessing cost. We introduce AIMER (\textbf{A}bsolute mean over root mean square \textbf{IM}portance for \textbf{E}xpert \textbf{R}anking), a simple calibration-free criterion that yields clear within-layer score separation and distinct expert stratification. Across 7B to 30B MoE language models at 25\% and 50\% pruning ratios over 16 benchmarks, AIMER consistently delivers competitive or stronger overall performance against state-of-the-art calibration-based expert pruning baselines with only 0.22--1.27 seconds for scoring the experts.