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Hauptverfasser: Zhong, Tao, Zheng, Dongzhe, Allen-Blanchette, Christine
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13997
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author Zhong, Tao
Zheng, Dongzhe
Allen-Blanchette, Christine
author_facet Zhong, Tao
Zheng, Dongzhe
Allen-Blanchette, Christine
contents Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers route tokens through a handful of experts, and learning-free compression of these layers reduces inference cost without retraining. A subtle obstruction blocks every existing compressor in this family: three experts can each be pairwise compatible yet form an irreducible cycle when merged together, so any score that ranks experts on pairwise signals is structurally blind to which triples are jointly mergeable. We show the obstruction is a precise mathematical object, the harmonic kernel of the simplicial Laplacian on a 2-complex whose vertices are experts, whose edges carry KL merge barriers, and whose faces carry triplet barriers; Hodge-decomposing the edge-barrier signal isolates the kernel exactly. We turn the diagnostic into a selection objective: HodgeCover greedily covers the harmonic-critical edges and triplet-critical triangles, and a hybrid variant of HodgeCover pairs it with off-the-shelf weight pruning on survivors. On three open-weight Sparse MoE backbones under aggressive expert reduction, HodgeCover matches state-of-the-art learning-free baselines on the expert-reduction axis, leads on the aggressive-compression frontier of the hybrid axis, and uniquely balances retained mass across all four Hodge components. These results show that exposing the harmonic kernel of a learned MoE structure changes which compressor wins at the regime that matters most.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13997
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HodgeCover: Higher-Order Topological Coverage Drives Compression of Sparse Mixture-of-Experts
Zhong, Tao
Zheng, Dongzhe
Allen-Blanchette, Christine
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers route tokens through a handful of experts, and learning-free compression of these layers reduces inference cost without retraining. A subtle obstruction blocks every existing compressor in this family: three experts can each be pairwise compatible yet form an irreducible cycle when merged together, so any score that ranks experts on pairwise signals is structurally blind to which triples are jointly mergeable. We show the obstruction is a precise mathematical object, the harmonic kernel of the simplicial Laplacian on a 2-complex whose vertices are experts, whose edges carry KL merge barriers, and whose faces carry triplet barriers; Hodge-decomposing the edge-barrier signal isolates the kernel exactly. We turn the diagnostic into a selection objective: HodgeCover greedily covers the harmonic-critical edges and triplet-critical triangles, and a hybrid variant of HodgeCover pairs it with off-the-shelf weight pruning on survivors. On three open-weight Sparse MoE backbones under aggressive expert reduction, HodgeCover matches state-of-the-art learning-free baselines on the expert-reduction axis, leads on the aggressive-compression frontier of the hybrid axis, and uniquely balances retained mass across all four Hodge components. These results show that exposing the harmonic kernel of a learned MoE structure changes which compressor wins at the regime that matters most.
title HodgeCover: Higher-Order Topological Coverage Drives Compression of Sparse Mixture-of-Experts
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13997