Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Transformer, the backbone architecture The profound impact of the Transformer architecture in the domain of multiple phenomenal language models, leverages sparsity of machine learning is undeniable, for the fields including by activating only a fraction of model parameters for each input natural language processing [3, 14, 18, 45, 48, 61] and computer token. The sparse structure, while allowing constant time costs, vision [17, 39, 64], to name a few. To further improve the capabilities results in space inefficiency: we still need to load all the model of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), one general parameters during inference. We introduce ResMoE, an innovative strategy is to scale up their parameters. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) MoE approximation framework that utilizes Wasserstein barycenter [52] extends the traditional feedforward neural network (FFN) layer to extract a common expert (barycenter expert) and approximate by replacing a single multilayer perceptron (MLP) with multiple the residuals between this barycenter expert and the original ones. MLPs, referred to as "experts". While enhancing the performance, ResMoE enhances the space efficiency for inference of large-scale sparse MoE keeps computing costs (FLOPs) comparable to the original MoE Transformers in a one-shot and data-agnostic manner without dense model, as only a few selected experts will be activated retraining while maintaining minimal accuracy loss, thereby each time. The framework of an MoE layer is demonstrated in paving the way for broader accessibility to large language models.

We present DeepSeek-V2, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model characterized by economical training and efficient inference. It comprises 236B total parameters, of which 21B are activated for each token, and supports a context length of 128K tokens. DeepSeek-V2 adopts innovative architectures including Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE. MLA guarantees efficient inference through significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector, while DeepSeekMoE enables training strong models at an economical cost through sparse computation. Compared with DeepSeek 67B, DeepSeek-V2 achieves significantly stronger performance, and meanwhile saves 42.5% of training costs, reduces the KV cache by 93.3%, and boosts the maximum generation throughput to 5.76 times. We pretrain DeepSeek-V2 on a high-quality and multi-source corpus consisting of 8.1T tokens, and further perform Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to fully unlock its potential. Evaluation results show that, even with only 21B activated parameters, DeepSeek-V2 and its chat versions still achieve top-tier performance among open-source models.

In the era of large language models, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a promising architecture for managing computational costs when scaling up model parameters. However, conventional MoE architectures like GShard, which activate the top-$K$ out of $N$ experts, face challenges in ensuring expert specialization, i.e. each expert acquires non-overlapping and focused knowledge. In response, we propose the DeepSeekMoE architecture towards ultimate expert specialization. It involves two principal strategies: (1) finely segmenting the experts into $mN$ ones and activating $mK$ from them, allowing for a more flexible combination of activated experts; (2) isolating $K_s$ experts as shared ones, aiming at capturing common knowledge and mitigating redundancy in routed experts. Starting from a modest scale with 2B parameters, we demonstrate that DeepSeekMoE 2B achieves comparable performance with GShard 2.9B, which has 1.5 times the expert parameters and computation. In addition, DeepSeekMoE 2B nearly approaches the performance of its dense counterpart with the same number of total parameters, which set the upper bound of MoE models. Subsequently, we scale up DeepSeekMoE to 16B parameters and show that it achieves comparable performance with LLaMA2 7B, with only about 40% of computations. Further, our preliminary efforts to scale up DeepSeekMoE to 145B parameters consistently validate its substantial advantages over the GShard architecture, and show its performance comparable with DeepSeek 67B, using only 28.5% (maybe even 18.2%) of computations.