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Main Authors: Zhou, Wenyong, Feng, Yuannuo, Chen, Yizhe, Wu, Taiqiang, Xu, Wendong, Qi, Wenbo, Liu, Zhengwu, Kang, Wang, Wong, Ngai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11800
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author Zhou, Wenyong
Feng, Yuannuo
Chen, Yizhe
Wu, Taiqiang
Xu, Wendong
Qi, Wenbo
Liu, Zhengwu
Kang, Wang
Wong, Ngai
author_facet Zhou, Wenyong
Feng, Yuannuo
Chen, Yizhe
Wu, Taiqiang
Xu, Wendong
Qi, Wenbo
Liu, Zhengwu
Kang, Wang
Wong, Ngai
contents Large language models (LLMs) with mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures achieve remarkable scalability by sparsely activating a subset of experts per token, yet their frequent expert switching creates memory bandwidth bottlenecks that compute-in-memory (CIM) architectures are well-suited to mitigate. However, analog CIM systems suffer from inherent hardware imperfections that perturb stored weights, and its negative impact on MoE-based LLMs in noisy CIM environments remains unexplored. In this work, we present the first systematic investigation of MoE-based LLMs under noise model calibrated with real chip measurements, revealing that hardware noise critically disrupts expert load balance and renders clean-trained routing decisions consistently suboptimal. Based on these findings, we propose ROMER, a post-training calibration framework that (1) replaces underactivated experts with high-frequency ones to restore load balance, and (2) recalibrates router logits via percentile-based normalization to stabilize routing under noise. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ROMER achieves up to 58.6\%, 58.8\%, and 59.8\% reduction in perplexity under real-chip noise conditions for DeepSeek-MoE, Qwen-MoE, and OLMoE, respectively, establishing its effectiveness and generalizability across diverse MoE architectures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_11800
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ROMER: Expert Replacement and Router Calibration for Robust MoE LLMs on Analog Compute-in-Memory Systems
Zhou, Wenyong
Feng, Yuannuo
Chen, Yizhe
Wu, Taiqiang
Xu, Wendong
Qi, Wenbo
Liu, Zhengwu
Kang, Wang
Wong, Ngai
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) with mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures achieve remarkable scalability by sparsely activating a subset of experts per token, yet their frequent expert switching creates memory bandwidth bottlenecks that compute-in-memory (CIM) architectures are well-suited to mitigate. However, analog CIM systems suffer from inherent hardware imperfections that perturb stored weights, and its negative impact on MoE-based LLMs in noisy CIM environments remains unexplored. In this work, we present the first systematic investigation of MoE-based LLMs under noise model calibrated with real chip measurements, revealing that hardware noise critically disrupts expert load balance and renders clean-trained routing decisions consistently suboptimal. Based on these findings, we propose ROMER, a post-training calibration framework that (1) replaces underactivated experts with high-frequency ones to restore load balance, and (2) recalibrates router logits via percentile-based normalization to stabilize routing under noise. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ROMER achieves up to 58.6\%, 58.8\%, and 59.8\% reduction in perplexity under real-chip noise conditions for DeepSeek-MoE, Qwen-MoE, and OLMoE, respectively, establishing its effectiveness and generalizability across diverse MoE architectures.
title ROMER: Expert Replacement and Router Calibration for Robust MoE LLMs on Analog Compute-in-Memory Systems
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11800