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Towards Greater Leverage: Scaling Laws for Efficient MoE Language Models (arxiv.org)
4 points by Anon84 321 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A score measures how much computing a mixture-of-experts model (where only some expert parts run per word) saves versus an equally good dense model, based on training over 300 models. A version with 0.85B active parameters matched a 6.1B dense model using over 7x less compute.

Abstract · Towards Greater Leverage: Scaling Laws for Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a dominant architecture for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) efficiently by decoupling total parameters from computational cost. However, this decoupling creates a critical challenge: predicting the model capacity of a given MoE configurations (e.g., expert activation ratio and granularity) remains an unresolved problem. To address this gap, we introduce Efficiency Leverage (EL), a metric quantifying the computational advantage of an MoE model over a dense equivalent. We conduct a large-scale empirical study, training over 300 models up to 28B parameters, to systematically investigate the relationship between MoE architectural configurations and EL. Our findings reveal that EL is primarily driven by the expert activation ratio and the total compute budget, both following predictable power laws, while expert granularity acts as a non-linear modulator with a clear optimal range. We integrate these discoveries into a unified scaling law that accurately predicts the EL of an MoE architecture based on its configuration. To validate our derived scaling laws, we designed and trained Ling-mini-beta, a pilot model for Ling-2.0 series with only 0.85B active parameters, alongside a 6.1B dense model for comparison. When trained on an identical 1T high-quality token dataset, Ling-mini-beta matched the performance of the 6.1B dense model while consuming over 7x fewer computational resources, thereby confirming the accuracy of our scaling laws. This work provides a principled and empirically-grounded foundation for the scaling of efficient MoE models.

Changxin Tian, Kunlong Chen, Jia Liu, Ziqi Liu, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou
arXiv:2507.17702 · cs.CL · submitted Jul 23, 2025 · updated Oct 21, 2025
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