软混合专家模型不能靠单个强专家实现复杂函数,需多个小专家协作。
Beyond Parameter Count: Implicit Bias in Soft Mixture of Experts
- 用可微门控替代离散路由,实现平滑专家混合。
- 单个强专家无法表示简单凸函数,必须多专家协同。
- 多小专家隐含分工偏好,利于推理时快速定位专用专家。
传统稀疏混合专家(MoE)模型认为,训练多个小型专家比训练单一大型专家更高效,且总参数量相同时可保持同等表征能力。近期提出的软混合专家(Soft MoE)采用可微门控函数实现令牌的平滑混合,缓解了稀疏MoE的训练不稳定性。然而,其是否引入影响表征能力或专家分化的隐式偏差尚不明确。本文证明:即使单个专家能力无限强,软混合专家也无法表示简单的凸函数。这表明软混合专家的成功无法仅由‘多个小专家模仿大专家’的传统观点解释,必须依赖多个专家才能实现良好表征能力(即使总参数量固定)。进一步地,本文提出软混合专家的专家分化度量,并在固定总参数量下,研究如何高效识别预测特定输入标签的专家子集。实验表明,当专家数量较多时,架构具有隐式偏向,能有效近似该专属专家子集,该方法易于实现,有望降低推理计算开销。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The traditional viewpoint on Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models is that instead of training a single large expert, which is computationally expensive, we can train many small experts. The hope is that if the total parameter count of the small experts equals that of the singular large expert, then we retain the representation power of the large expert while gaining computational tractability and promoting expert specialization. The recently introduced Soft MoE replaces the Sparse MoE's discrete routing mechanism with a differentiable gating function that smoothly mixes tokens. While this smooth gating function successfully mitigates the various training instabilities associated with Sparse MoE, it is unclear whether it induces implicit biases that affect Soft MoE's representation power or potential for expert specialization. We prove that Soft MoE with a single arbitrarily powerful expert cannot represent simple convex functions. This justifies that Soft MoE's success cannot be explained by the traditional viewpoint of many small experts collectively mimicking the representation power of a single large expert, and that multiple experts are actually necessary to achieve good representation power (even for a fixed total parameter count). Continuing along this line of investigation, we introduce a notion of expert specialization for Soft MoE, and while varying the number of experts yet fixing the total parameter count, we consider the following (computationally intractable) task. Given any input, how can we discover the expert subset that is specialized to predict this input's label? We empirically show that when there are many small experts, the architecture is implicitly biased in a fashion that allows us to efficiently approximate the specialized expert subset. Our method can be easily implemented to potentially reduce computation during inference.
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