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MoEfication: Transformer Feed-forward Layers are Mixtures of Experts

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arxiv 2110.01786 v3 pith:SZKVNTAP submitted 2021-10-05 cs.CL

MoEfication: Transformer Feed-forward Layers are Mixtures of Experts

classification cs.CL
keywords ffnsmoeficationparametersexpertsfunctionalpartitionsbraincomputational
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Recent work has shown that feed-forward networks (FFNs) in pre-trained Transformers are a key component, storing various linguistic and factual knowledge. However, the computational patterns of FFNs are still unclear. In this work, we study the computational patterns of FFNs and observe that most inputs only activate a tiny ratio of neurons of FFNs. This phenomenon is similar to the sparsity of the human brain, which drives research on functional partitions of the human brain. To verify whether functional partitions also emerge in FFNs, we propose to convert a model into its MoE version with the same parameters, namely MoEfication. Specifically, MoEfication consists of two phases: (1) splitting the parameters of FFNs into multiple functional partitions as experts, and (2) building expert routers to decide which experts will be used for each input. Experimental results show that MoEfication can conditionally use 10% to 30% of FFN parameters while maintaining over 95% original performance for different models on various downstream tasks. Besides, MoEfication brings two advantages: (1) it significantly reduces the FLOPS of inference, i.e., 2x speedup with 25% of FFN parameters, and (2) it provides a fine-grained perspective to study the inner mechanism of FFNs. The source code of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/MoEfication.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. STAR: Rethinking MoE Routing as Structure-Aware Subspace Learning

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    STAR rethinks MoE routing as structure-aware subspace learning by adding a GHA-tracked principal subspace to standard routers, yielding more stable specialization and better performance on synthetic, language, and vis...

  2. Mixture-of-Experts Can Surpass Dense LLMs Under Strictly Equal Resource

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    MoE models with activation rates in an optimal region outperform dense LLMs of identical total parameter count, training compute, and data budget, with the optimal region consistent across scales.

  3. Analytical FFN-to-MoE Restructuring via Activation Pattern Analysis

    cs.LG 2025-02 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    An analytical post-training method restructures FFNs into MoE by partitioning neurons based on activation patterns and building a router from statistics, achieving 1.17x speedup with minimal resources.