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Main Authors: Abdurrahman, Muhammad Shahir, Deng, Chun, Mirhoseini, Azalia, Levis, Philip
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06206
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author Abdurrahman, Muhammad Shahir
Deng, Chun
Mirhoseini, Azalia
Levis, Philip
author_facet Abdurrahman, Muhammad Shahir
Deng, Chun
Mirhoseini, Azalia
Levis, Philip
contents Mixture of experts has emerged as the primary mechanism for making Large Language Models (LLMs) computationally efficient. However, in distributed settings, communicating token embeddings between experts is a significant bottleneck. We present the novel Federation of Experts (FoE) architecture. FoE restructures the MoE block of a transformer layer into multiple MoE clusters. Each cluster is responsible for only one of the KV heads and expert parallelism is applied between those experts. Between clusters, a sum synchronizes the post-attention residuals, which then drives routing and dispatch for the next MoE block. In a single-node setting, FoE completely eliminates all-to-all communication as all experts within a group are contained on the same GPU. In multi-node settings, FoE confines all-to-all communication to the intra-node fabric, thus significantly reducing communication overhead. An implementation of FoE finds that on LongBench, FoE significantly improves inference throughput and latency in both single-node and multi-node settings, reducing the end-to-end forward-pass latency by up to 5.2x, TTFT by 3.62x, and TBT by 1.95x. It does so while achieving comparable generation quality to a mixture of experts model of the same size and training configuration.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06206
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Federation of Experts: Communication Efficient Distributed Inference for Large Language Models
Abdurrahman, Muhammad Shahir
Deng, Chun
Mirhoseini, Azalia
Levis, Philip
Machine Learning
Mixture of experts has emerged as the primary mechanism for making Large Language Models (LLMs) computationally efficient. However, in distributed settings, communicating token embeddings between experts is a significant bottleneck. We present the novel Federation of Experts (FoE) architecture. FoE restructures the MoE block of a transformer layer into multiple MoE clusters. Each cluster is responsible for only one of the KV heads and expert parallelism is applied between those experts. Between clusters, a sum synchronizes the post-attention residuals, which then drives routing and dispatch for the next MoE block. In a single-node setting, FoE completely eliminates all-to-all communication as all experts within a group are contained on the same GPU. In multi-node settings, FoE confines all-to-all communication to the intra-node fabric, thus significantly reducing communication overhead. An implementation of FoE finds that on LongBench, FoE significantly improves inference throughput and latency in both single-node and multi-node settings, reducing the end-to-end forward-pass latency by up to 5.2x, TTFT by 3.62x, and TBT by 1.95x. It does so while achieving comparable generation quality to a mixture of experts model of the same size and training configuration.
title Federation of Experts: Communication Efficient Distributed Inference for Large Language Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06206