about
Scaling Embeddings Outperforms Scaling Experts in Language Models (arxiv.org)
1 point by simonpure 247 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of adding more expert networks that only a few run per word, this model spends most of its parameters on the table that turns words into numbers. Its 68.5-billion-parameter version, using about 3 billion at once, beat expert-heavy models of the same size.

Abstract

While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have become the standard for sparsity scaling in large language models, they increasingly face diminishing returns and system-level bottlenecks. In this work, we explore embedding scaling as a potent, orthogonal dimension for scaling sparsity. Through a comprehensive analysis and experiments, we identify specific regimes where embedding scaling achieves a superior Pareto frontier compared to expert scaling. We systematically characterize the critical architectural factors governing this efficacy -- ranging from parameter budgeting to the interplay with model width and depth. Moreover, by integrating tailored system optimizations and speculative decoding, we effectively convert this sparsity into tangible inference speedups. Guided by these insights, we introduce LongCat-Flash-Lite, a 68.5B parameter model with ~3B activated trained from scratch. Despite allocating over 30B parameters to embeddings, LongCat-Flash-Lite not only surpasses parameter-equivalent MoE baselines but also exhibits exceptional competitiveness against existing models of comparable scale, particularly in agentic and coding domains.

Hong Liu, Jiaqi Zhang, Chao Wang, Xing Hu, Linkun Lyu, Jiaqi Sun, Xurui Yang, Bo Wang, Fengcun Li, Yulei Qian, Lingtong Si, Yerui Sun, et al.
arXiv:2601.21204 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Jan 29, 2026 · updated Feb 11, 2026
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN