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Fast Training of Mixture-of-Experts for Time Series Forecasting via Expert Loss Integration

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We propose a novel adaptive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework for time series forecasting that enhances expert specialization by incorporating expert-specific loss information directly into the training process. Notably, the overall objective comprises the base forecasting loss and expert-specific losses, allowing expert-level prediction errors to jointly shape training alongside the global forecasting loss. This framework is further combined with a partial online learning strategy, enabling incremental updates of both the gating mechanism and expert parameters. This approach significantly reduces computational cost by eliminating the need for repeated full model retraining. By integrating expert-level loss awareness with efficient online optimization, the proposed method achieves improved learning efficiency while maintaining strong predictive performance. Empirical results across economic, tourism, and energy datasets with varying frequencies demonstrate that the proposed approach generally outperforms both statistical methods and state-of-the-art neural network models, such as Transformers and WaveNet, in forecasting accuracy and computational efficiency. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the expert-specific loss integration strategy, highlighting its contribution to enhancing predictive performance.


Alternating Gradient Descent and Mixture-of-Experts for Integrated Multimodal Perception

Neural Information Processing Systems

IMP makes use of a novel design that combines Alternating Gradient Descent (AGD) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) for efficient model & task scaling. We conduct extensive empirical studies and reveal the following key insights: 1) performing gradient descent updates by alternating on diverse modalities, loss functions, and tasks, with varying input resolutions, efficiently improves the model.




\textit{Read-ME} : Refactorizing LLMs as Router-Decoupled Mixture of Experts with System Co-Design

Neural Information Processing Systems

The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has led to the adoption of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures that dynamically leverage specialized subnetworks for improved efficiency and performance. Despite their benefits, MoE models face significant challenges during inference, including inefficient memory management and suboptimal batching, due to misaligned design choices between the model architecture and the system policies. Furthermore, the conventional approach of training MoEs from scratch is increasingly prohibitive in terms of cost. In this paper, we propose a novel framework $\textit{Read-ME}$ that transforms pre-trained dense LLMs into smaller MoE models (in contrast to ``upcycling generalist MoEs), avoiding the high costs of ground-up training. Our approach employs activation sparsity to extract experts. To compose experts, we examine the widely-adopted layer-wise router design and show its redundancy, and thus we introduce the pre-gating router decoupled from the MoE backbone that facilitates system-friendly pre-computing and lookahead scheduling, enhancing expert-aware batching and caching.Our codesign therefore addresses critical gaps on both the algorithmic and system fronts, establishing a scalable and efficient alternative for LLM inference in resource-constrained settings.$\textit{Read-ME}$


SwitchHead: Accelerating Transformers with Mixture-of-Experts Attention

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite many recent works on Mixture of Experts (MoEs) for resource-efficient Transformer language models, existing methods mostly focus on MoEs for feedforward layers. Previous attempts at extending MoE to the self-attention layer fail to match the performance of the parameter-matched baseline. Our novel SwitchHead is an effective MoE method for the attention layer that successfully reduces both the compute and memory requirements, achieving wall-clock speedup, while matching the language modeling performance of the baseline Transformer. Our novel MoE mechanism allows SwitchHead to compute up to 8 times fewer attention matrices than the standard Transformer. SwitchHead can also be combined with MoE feedforward layers, resulting in fully-MoE SwitchAll Transformers. For our 262M parameter model trained on C4, SwitchHead matches the perplexity of standard models with only 44% compute and 27% memory usage. Zero-shot experiments on downstream tasks confirm the performance of SwitchHead, e.g., achieving more than 3.5% absolute improvements on BliMP compared to the baseline with an equal compute resource.


Multilinear Mixture of Experts: Scalable Expert Specialization through Factorization

Neural Information Processing Systems

The Mixture of Experts (MoE) paradigm provides a powerful way to decompose dense layers into smaller, modular computations often more amenable to human interpretation, debugging, and editability. However, a major challenge lies in the computational cost of scaling the number of experts high enough to achieve fine-grained specialization. In this paper, we propose the Multilinear Mixture of Experts (μMoE) layer to address this, focusing on vision models.


A Model Ensemble-Based Post-Processing Framework for Fairness-Aware Prediction

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Striking an optimal balance between predictive performance and fairness continues to be a fundamental challenge in machine learning. In this work, we propose a post-processing framework that facilitates fairness-aware prediction by leveraging model ensembling. Designed to operate independently of any specific model internals, our approach is widely applicable across various learning tasks, model architectures, and fairness definitions. Through extensive experiments spanning classification, regression, and survival analysis, we demonstrate that the framework effectively enhances fairness while maintaining, or only minimally affecting, predictive accuracy.


Variational Distillation of Diffusion Policies into Mixture of Experts

Neural Information Processing Systems

This work introduces Variational Diffusion Distillation (VDD), a novel method that distills denoising diffusion policies into Mixtures of Experts (MoE) through variational inference. Diffusion Models are the current state-of-the-art in generative modeling due to their exceptional ability to accurately learn and represent complex, multi-modal distributions. This ability allows Diffusion Models to replicate the inherent diversity in human behavior, making them the preferred models in behavior learning such as Learning from Human Demonstrations (LfD).However, diffusion models come with some drawbacks, including the intractability of likelihoods and long inference times due to their iterative sampling process. The inference times, in particular, pose a significant challenge to real-time applications such as robot control.In contrast, MoEs effectively address the aforementioned issues while retaining the ability to represent complex distributions but are notoriously difficult to train.VDD is the first method that distills pre-trained diffusion models into MoE models, and hence, combines the expressiveness of Diffusion Models with the benefits of Mixture Models.Specifically, VDD leverages a decompositional upper bound of the variational objective that allows the training of each expert separately, resulting in a robust optimization scheme for MoEs.VDD demonstrates across nine complex behavior learning tasks, that it is able to: i) accurately distill complex distributions learned by the diffusion model, ii) outperform existing state-of-the-art distillation methods, and iii) surpass conventional methods for training MoE. The code and videos are available at https://intuitive-robots.github.io/vdd-website.


Spiking Transformer with Experts Mixture

Neural Information Processing Systems

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide a sparse spike-driven mechanism which is believed to be critical for energy-efficient deep learning. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), on the other side, aligns with the brain mechanism of distributed and sparse processing, resulting in an efficient way of enhancing model capacity and conditional computation. In this work, we consider how to incorporate SNNs' spike-driven and MoE's conditional computation into a unified framework. However, MoE uses softmax to get the dense conditional weights for each expert and TopK to hard-sparsify the network, which does not fit the properties of SNNs. To address this issue, we reformulate MoE in SNNs and introduce the Spiking Experts Mixture Mechanism (SEMM) from the perspective of sparse spiking activation. Both the experts and the router output spiking sequences, and their element-wise operation makes SEMM computation spike-driven and dynamic sparse-conditional. By developing SEMM into Spiking Transformer, the Experts Mixture Spiking Attention (EMSA) and the Experts Mixture Spiking Perceptron (EMSP) are proposed, which performs routing allocation for head-wise and channel-wise spiking experts, respectively. Experiments show that SEMM realizes sparse conditional computation and obtains a stable improvement on neuromorphic and static datasets with approximate computational overhead based on the Spiking Transformer baselines.