arXiv:2602.19938cs.LG2026-02

提出无需重训练的动态负载均衡方法,提升稀疏专家模型推理效率

A Replicate-and-Quantize Strategy for Plug-and-Play Load Balancing of Sparse Mixture-of-Experts LLMs

  • 通过复制热点专家并量化其他专家,在不改路由器情况下平衡负载
  • 实验显示负载不均衡降低1.4倍,精度波动小于±0.6%
  • 适合部署阶段优化推理性能的工程师与研究者使用

稀疏专家混合(SMoE)架构虽能高效扩展大语言模型并在固定计算预算下保持高精度,但常面临专家间严重负载不均问题:少数专家处理大量输入而其他专家被闲置。现有工作多聚焦训练阶段解决方案,如路由正则化或辅助损失,忽视了对实际部署至关重要的推理阶段行为。本文系统分析推理时的专家路由,发现:(i) 负载不均随批量增大而加剧;(ii) 选择频率无法可靠反映专家重要性;(iii) 可通过小规模校准集估算整体专家工作量与重要性。据此提出无需重训练、近似无损的推理时负载均衡框架Replicate-and-Quantize(R&Q):在每层中复制热点专家以提升并行能力,同时量化非关键专家及其副本以维持原始内存预算。引入负载不均衡评分(LIS),通过对比热点专家负载与平均分配基线衡量路由偏斜。在多个代表性SMoE模型与基准测试上,实现最高1.4倍的不均衡减少,精度保持在±0.6%范围内,显著提升推理可预测性与效率。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures are increasingly used to scale large language models efficiently, delivering strong accuracy under fixed compute budgets. However, SMoE models often suffer from severe load imbalance across experts, where a small subset of experts receives most tokens while others are underutilized. Prior work has focused mainly on training-time solutions such as routing regularization or auxiliary losses, leaving inference-time behavior, which is critical for deployment, less explored. We present a systematic analysis of expert routing during inference and identify three findings: (i) load imbalance persists and worsens with larger batch sizes, (ii) selection frequency does not reliably reflect expert importance, and (iii) overall expert workload and importance can be estimated using a small calibration set. These insights motivate inference-time mechanisms that rebalance workloads without retraining or router modification. We propose Replicate-and-Quantize (R&Q), a training-free and near-lossless framework for dynamic workload rebalancing. In each layer, heavy-hitter experts are replicated to increase parallel capacity, while less critical experts and replicas are quantized to remain within the original memory budget. We also introduce a Load-Imbalance Score (LIS) to measure routing skew by comparing heavy-hitter load to an equal allocation baseline. Experiments across representative SMoE models and benchmarks show up to 1.4x reduction in imbalance with accuracy maintained within +/-0.6%, enabling more predictable and efficient inference.

专家混合负载均衡推理优化量化

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