共享专家池设计让模型更高效,减少参数浪费。
UniPool: A Globally Shared Expert Pool for Mixture-of-Experts

- 用全局共享池替代每层独立专家,统一管理专家资源。
- 在多个规模模型上,验证损失降低最多0.0386,性能更优。
- 专家参数可亚线性增长,适合追求效率的模型部署。
现代混合专家(MoE)架构采用每层固定分配专家容量的规则,导致参数随深度线性增长,且假设每层需独立专家能力。然而,近期分析与路由探测表明:将深层的top-k路由替换为随机路由,下游准确率仅下降1.0-1.6分。基于此冗余性,本文提出UniPool——将专家容量视为全局预算,由各层独立路由访问单一共享专家池。为保障训练稳定,引入池级辅助损失以平衡专家使用,并采用NormRouter实现稀疏、稳定的路由。在5个LLaMA架构规模(182M、469M、650M、830M、978M参数)上,使用Pile数据集(30B tokens)训练,UniPool始终优于对应基础MoE模型,验证损失最高降低0.0386。此外,仅使用41.6%-66.7%原专家参数预算的简化版UniPool,仍能匹配或超越逐层MoE,证明专家参数无需随深度线性增长,可亚线性扩展,同时保持更高效率与性能。进一步分析显示,UniPool优势可与细粒度专家分解兼容。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Modern Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures allocate expert capacity through a rigid per-layer rule: each transformer layer owns a separate expert set. This convention couples depth scaling with linear expert-parameter growth and assumes that every layer needs isolated expert capacity. However, recent analyses and our routing probe challenge this allocation rule: replacing a deeper layer's learned top-k router with uniform random routing drops downstream accuracy by only 1.0-1.6 points across multiple production MoE models. Motivated by this redundancy, we propose UniPool, an MoE architecture that treats expert capacity as a global architectural budget by replacing per-layer expert ownership with a single shared pool accessed by independent per-layer routers. To enable stable and balanced training under sharing, we introduce a pool-level auxiliary loss that balances expert utilization across the entire pool, and adopt NormRouter to provide sparse and scale-stable routing into the shared expert pool. Across five LLaMA-architecture model scales (182M, 469M, 650M, 830M, and 978M parameters) trained on 30B tokens from the Pile, UniPool consistently improves validation loss and perplexity over the matched vanilla MoE baselines. Across these scales, UniPool reduces validation loss by up to 0.0386 relative to vanilla MoE. Beyond raw loss improvement, our results identify pool size as an explicit depth-scaling hyperparameter: reduced-pool UniPool variants using only 41.6%-66.7% of the vanilla expert-parameter budget match or outperform layer-wise MoE at the tested scales. This shows that, under a shared-pool design, expert parameters need not grow linearly with depth; they can grow sublinearly while remaining more efficient and effective than vanilla MoE. Further analysis shows that UniPool's benefits compose with finer-grained expert decomposition.
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