Huan Wang
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2026
AIMER: Calibration-Free Task-Agnostic MoE Expert Pruning
Zongfang Liu | Guangyi Chen | Yifan Shen | Shengkun Tang | Huan Wang | Xin Yuan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zongfang Liu | Guangyi Chen | Yifan Shen | Shengkun Tang | Huan Wang | Xin Yuan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models increase parameter capacity without proportional per-token computation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making expert pruning important for reducing memory and serving overhead. Existing task-agnostic expert-pruning methods are typically calibration-dependent: they estimate expert importance from routing or activation statistics on a calibration set, making pruning decisions sensitive to calibration-data variation while introducing substantial preprocessing cost. We propose AIMER (Absolute mean over root mean square IMportance for Expert Ranking), a simple calibration-free criterion that identifies more distinct experts by capturing the concentration pattern of expert weights, making it well suited for task-agnostic expert pruning. Across 7B to 47B MoE language models with distinct architectures and 16 diverse benchmarks, AIMER consistently delivers stronger capability balance across diverse tasks than existing calibration-free methods. Surprisingly, AIMER also achieves better balance than strong calibration-based expert-pruning baselines calibrated on the widely used task-agnostic C4 corpus, while requiring only 0.22–2.06 seconds to score all experts.