发现稀有但关键的超级专家,揭示MoE大模型推理机制的核心漏洞。
Unveiling Super Experts in Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models
- 识别出少数极端激活的超级专家(SEs),其微小变动即引发模型性能崩溃。
- 仅删3个超专家就让Qwen3-30B-A3B生成重复无意义输出,数学推理能力严重下降。
- 适合研究模型内部机制、稳定性与压缩风险的开发者和研究人员参考。
本研究首次系统揭示了混合专家大语言模型(MoE LLMs)中一类起关键作用的特殊专家群体。这些专家在开源MoE模型中普遍存在,数量极少但至关重要:仅从6,144个专家中移除3个,即可导致Qwen3-30B-A3B模型产生重复且无信息的输出。我们称其为超级专家(SEs)。分析显示:(i) SEs在down_proj输出中表现为罕见但极端的激活异常,引发解码器层间隐藏状态的巨幅激活;其分布具有模型特异性,与训练数据无关,且不受后训练影响。(ii) 通过剪枝验证,发现它们对多种任务均有显著影响,尤其在数学推理方面作用突出。(iii) 进一步表明,SEs是MoE模型中系统性异常机制的主要来源,压缩它们会严重破坏注意力下沉机制,最终导致模型崩溃。该发现填补了当前对MoE模型内部动态理解的重要空白。代码已开源:https://github.com/ZunhaiSu/Super-Experts-Profilling。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In this study, we report, for the first time, the discovery and systematic investigation of a distinct subset of experts that play a pivotal role in the MoE LLMs' forward inference. These experts are prevalent in open-source MoE LLMs, and despite their extremely limited number, pruning them results in a substantial decline in model performance (e.g., prune just three out of 6,144 causes Qwen3-30B-A3B to generate repetitive and uninformative outputs).We refer to these experts as Super Experts (SEs). Our comprehensive analysis provides progressively deeper insights into SEs: (i) SEs are characterized by rare but extreme activation outliers in the output of the down_proj, which give rise to massive activations in the hidden states between decoder layers. Moreover, the distribution of SEs is model-specific, data-agnostic, and remains unaffected by post-training processes. (ii) By pruning SEs, we assess their significance across a variety of tasks, revealing their considerable impact on the model's overall performance, particularly in mathematical reasoning. (iii) We further investigate why compressing SEs exerts such a pronounced impact. We show that, in MoE LLMs, SEs serve as the primary source of the systematic outlier mechanism in Transformers, and that compressing them profoundly disrupts this process, ultimately causing the collapse of attention sinks. These findings advance the understanding of the internal dynamics of MoE LLMs, filling an important gap in the current knowledge. The code is provided in https://github.com/ZunhaiSu/Super-Experts-Profilling.
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