发现MoE模型中层路由能对齐多语言,提升非英语性能。
Multilingual Routing in Mixture-of-Experts
- 通过分析中间层路由模式,揭示多语言文本处理机制。
- 干预中间层路由可提升1-2%跨语言性能,效果稳定。
- 适合关注多语言大模型优化的研究者与工程师。
混合专家(MoE)架构是现代大模型扩展的核心,但其稀疏路由动态如何响应多语言数据仍不清楚。本文利用并行多语言数据集分析专家路由模式,发现早期和晚期解码层的路由具有语言特异性,而中间层则表现出显著的跨语言路由对齐,类似于密集型大模型中的参数共享趋势。特别地,我们发现模型在某一语言上的表现与该语言令牌在中间层被路由至英文的方式相似度呈强正相关。进一步地,我们提出一种推理时干预方法,通过促进英文任务专家在中间层的激活来引导路由器,成功提升了多语言性能。这些1-2%的增益在两个评估任务、三种模型和15+语言上均一致有效,且即使在经过充分训练的顶尖模型上也成立。相比之下,非中间层干预或针对多语言专用专家的调整反而导致性能下降。整体而言,本研究揭示了MoE处理非英语文本的机制,并表明泛化能力受限于模型在所有语言中利用语言通用专家的能力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have become the key to scaling modern LLMs, yet little is understood about how their sparse routing dynamics respond to multilingual data. In this work, we analyze expert routing patterns using parallel multilingual datasets and present highly interpretable layer-wise phenomena. We find that MoE models route tokens in language-specific ways in the early and late decoder layers but exhibit significant cross-lingual routing alignment in middle layers, mirroring parameter-sharing trends observed in dense LLMs. In particular, we reveal a clear, strong correlation between a model's performance in a given language and how similarly its tokens are routed to English in these layers. Extending beyond correlation, we explore inference-time interventions that induce higher cross-lingual routing alignment. We introduce a method that steers the router by promoting middle-layer task experts frequently activated in English, and it successfully increases multilingual performance. These 1-2% gains are remarkably consistent across two evaluation tasks, three models, and 15+ languages, especially given that these simple interventions override routers of extensively trained, state-of-the-art LLMs. In comparison, interventions outside of the middle layers or targeting multilingual-specialized experts only yield performance degradation. Altogether, we present numerous findings that explain how MoEs process non-English text and demonstrate that generalization is limited by the model's ability to leverage language-universal experts in all languages.
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