DOT-MoE: Differentiable Optimal Transport for MoEfication
Fuente:
arXiv
Guardado en:
| Autores principales: | , , , , |
|---|---|
| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2026
|
| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | |
| Etiquetas: |
Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
|
| _version_ | 1866910279589167104 |
|---|---|
| author | Bamba, Udbhav Chavan, Arnav Thakur, Aryamaan Teig, Steve Gupta, Deepak |
| author_facet | Bamba, Udbhav Chavan, Arnav Thakur, Aryamaan Teig, Steve Gupta, Deepak |
| contents | The scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven significant performance gains but created substantial challenges in inference efficiency. While Mixture of Experts (MoEs) architectures address this by decoupling model size from inference cost, training MoEs from scratch is often unstable and compute intensive. Conversion of pre-trained dense models into sparse MoEs has emerged as an alternative solution; however, existing methods typically rely on heuristic neuron clustering or random splitting to partition the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) into experts. In this work, we propose DOT-MoE, a novel framework that formulates the decomposition of dense layers as a Differentiable Optimal Transport (DOT) problem. Instead of static heuristics, we model neuron assignment as a balanced transport problem, utilizing differentiable Sinkhorn-Knopp iterations to enforce strict expert capacity constraints. Furthermore, we utilize Straight-Through Estimators (STE) to jointly learn the discrete neuron-to-expert assignment and the token-to-expert routing policy end-to-end. Extensive experiments across multiple architectures and benchmarks demonstrate that DOT-MoE significantly outperforms structured pruning, heuristic clustering, and random-split baselines, retaining 90% of the original dense model's performance while reducing active parameters by 50%. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_01666 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | DOT-MoE: Differentiable Optimal Transport for MoEfication Bamba, Udbhav Chavan, Arnav Thakur, Aryamaan Teig, Steve Gupta, Deepak Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence The scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven significant performance gains but created substantial challenges in inference efficiency. While Mixture of Experts (MoEs) architectures address this by decoupling model size from inference cost, training MoEs from scratch is often unstable and compute intensive. Conversion of pre-trained dense models into sparse MoEs has emerged as an alternative solution; however, existing methods typically rely on heuristic neuron clustering or random splitting to partition the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) into experts. In this work, we propose DOT-MoE, a novel framework that formulates the decomposition of dense layers as a Differentiable Optimal Transport (DOT) problem. Instead of static heuristics, we model neuron assignment as a balanced transport problem, utilizing differentiable Sinkhorn-Knopp iterations to enforce strict expert capacity constraints. Furthermore, we utilize Straight-Through Estimators (STE) to jointly learn the discrete neuron-to-expert assignment and the token-to-expert routing policy end-to-end. Extensive experiments across multiple architectures and benchmarks demonstrate that DOT-MoE significantly outperforms structured pruning, heuristic clustering, and random-split baselines, retaining 90% of the original dense model's performance while reducing active parameters by 50%. |
| title | DOT-MoE: Differentiable Optimal Transport for MoEfication |
| topic | Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01666 |