sparse模型在高温解码下是否更不稳定?实验发现指令微调才是关键。
Reliability Under Randomness: An Empirical Analysis of Sparse and Dense Language Models Across Decoding Temperatures
- 对比稀疏与稠密模型在不同温度下的输出稳定性,聚焦指令微调影响
- 稀疏指令微调模型在全温度范围内表现与稠密模型相当,基线稀疏模型则随温度升高退化
- 适用于对输出一致性要求高的场景,如自动化评估、可信AI部署
稀疏的专家混合(MoE)架构在大语言模型中日益普及,但其在随机解码下的可靠性仍存疑。尽管条件计算可显著提升效率,但其与温度采样结合是否会加剧输出不稳定性尚不明确。本文评估了三种代表性模型:OLMoE-7B(稀疏基础)、Mixtral-8x7B(稀疏指令微调)和Qwen2.5-3B(稠密指令微调),在确定性算术推理任务上,涵盖从贪婪解码到温度T=1.0的四种配置,共生成9,360次结果。评估指标包括准确率、格式合规性、重复生成的一致性及置信度。结果显示,稀疏指令微调模型在所有温度下均表现出与稠密模型相当的稳定性,而稀疏基础模型则随温度上升出现系统性退化。结论表明,在确定性任务中,指令微调比架构稀疏性更能决定对解码随机性的鲁棒性。研究为在高可靠性场景中安全采用稀疏模型提供了依据。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The increasing prevalence of sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures in large language models raises important questions regarding their reliability under stochastic decoding. While conditional computation enables substantial gains in computational efficiency, it remains unclear whether the interaction between sparse routing and temperature-based sampling compromises output stability relative to dense architectures. This work investigates whether conditional computation in MoE models amplifies decoding-induced randomness, leading to reduced reliability as temperature increases. We evaluate three representative models: OLMoE-7B (sparse base), Mixtral-8x7B (sparse instruction-tuned), and Qwen2.5-3B (dense instruction-tuned) on deterministic arithmetic reasoning tasks with objectively verifiable answers. Experiments span four decoding configurations, ranging from greedy decoding to T=1.0. Our evaluation encompasses accuracy, format compliance, output consistency across repeated generations, and confidence metrics, totaling 9,360 model generations. Results demonstrate that the sparse instruction-tuned model exhibits stability comparable to the dense instruction-tuned model across all decoding temperatures, while the sparse base model shows systematic degradation as temperature increases. These findings indicate that instruction tuning, rather than architectural sparsity, is the primary determinant of robustness to decoding randomness on deterministic tasks. We discuss the implications of these results for deploying sparse language models in reliability-critical applications, highlighting scenarios in which sparse architectures can be safely adopted without sacrificing output stability.
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