AutoMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture-of-Experts with Adaptive Computation for Efficient Neural Machine Translation

Ganesh Jawahar, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Xiaodong Liu, Young Jin Kim, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks Lakshmanan, V.S., Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Sebastien Bubeck, Jianfeng Gao


Abstract
Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) models have obtained state-of-the-art performance in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) tasks. Existing works in MoE mostly consider a homogeneous design where the same number of experts of the same size are placed uniformly throughout the network. Furthermore, existing MoE works do not consider computational constraints (e.g., FLOPs, latency) to guide their design. To this end, we develop AutoMoE – a framework for designing heterogeneous MoE’s under computational constraints. AutoMoE leverages Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to obtain efficient sparse MoE sub-transformers with 4x inference speedup (CPU) and FLOPs reduction over manually designed Transformers, with parity in BLEU score over dense Transformer and within 1 BLEU point of MoE SwitchTransformer, on aggregate over benchmark datasets for NMT.Heterogeneous search space with dense and sparsely activated Transformer modules (e.g., how many experts? where to place them? what should be their sizes?) allows for adaptive compute – where different amounts of computations are used for different tokens in the input. Adaptivity comes naturally from routing decisions which send tokens to experts of different sizes. AutoMoE code, data, and trained models are available at https://aka.ms/AutoMoE.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.580
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9116–9132
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.580
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.580
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ganesh Jawahar, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Xiaodong Liu, Young Jin Kim, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks Lakshmanan, V.S., Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Sebastien Bubeck, and Jianfeng Gao. 2023. AutoMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture-of-Experts with Adaptive Computation for Efficient Neural Machine Translation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 9116–9132, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AutoMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture-of-Experts with Adaptive Computation for Efficient Neural Machine Translation (Jawahar et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.580.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.580.mp4