Nanxin Zeng
Author directory2026
Ban&Pick: Enhancing Performance and Efficiency of MoE-LLMs via Smarter Routing
Yuanteng Chen | Peisong Wang | Yuantian Shao | Nanxin Zeng | Chang Xu | Jian Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yuanteng Chen | Peisong Wang | Yuantian Shao | Nanxin Zeng | Chang Xu | Jian Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a key architecture for scaling large language models. Recent fine-grained MoE designs introduce hundreds of experts per layer, with multiple experts activated per token, enabling stronger specialization. However, during pre-training, routers are optimized mainly for stability and robustness: they converge prematurely and enforce balanced usage, limiting the full potential of model performance and efficiency at inference. In this work, we uncover two overlooked issues: (i) a few highly influential experts are underutilized due to premature and balanced routing decisions; and (ii) enforcing a fixed number of active experts per token introduces substantial redundancy. Instead of retraining or redesigning MoE architectures, we introduce Ban Pick, a training-free, plug-and-play strategy for smarter routing. Pick discovers and reinforces key experts, a small group with outsized impact on performance, leading to notable accuracy gains. Ban further dynamically prunes redundant experts based on layer and token sensitivity, delivering faster inference. Experiments on fine-grained MoE-LLMs (DeepSeek, Qwen3) across math, code, and general reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Ban Pick delivers free performance gains and inference acceleration. For instance, on Qwen3-30B-A3B, it improves accuracy from 80.67 to 84.66 on AIME2024 and from 65.66 to 68.18 on GPQA-Diamond, while accelerating inference by 1.25× under the vLLM.
MODE: Modality-Decomposed Expert-Level Mixed-Precision Quantization for MoE Multimodal LLMs
Yuanteng Chen | Nanxin Zeng | Peisong Wang | Zhilei Liu | Yuantian Shao | Shiqiang Lang | Tao Liu | Chuangyi Li | Qinghao Hu | Gang Li | Jing Liu | Jian Cheng
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuanteng Chen | Nanxin Zeng | Peisong Wang | Zhilei Liu | Yuantian Shao | Shiqiang Lang | Tao Liu | Chuangyi Li | Qinghao Hu | Gang Li | Jing Liu | Jian Cheng
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mixture-of-Experts Multimodal Large Language Models (MoE-MLLMs) offer remarkable performance but incur prohibitive GPU memory costs, making compression essential. Among PTQ methods, expert-level mixed-precision quantization has proven effective for MoE-LLMs, yet suffers notable degradation on MoE-MLLMs due to two overlooked biases in expert importance estimation. (1) At the cross-modal level, the numerical dominance of vision tokens causes expert selection frequency to be dominated by vision tokens, masking experts that are critical to the text modality; (2) at the intra-vision level, the large proportion of redundant vision tokens further skew frequency statistics, obscuring experts critical for informative visual content. To bridge gaps, we propose MODE, a modality-decomposed expert-level mixed-precision quantization framework for MoE-MLLMs that decomposes expert selection frequency by modality, filters redundant vision tokens to obtain denoised visual frequency, and further evaluates quantization sensitivity per modality as a complementary signal to frequency-based estimation. These signals are integrated into an Integer Linear Programming formulation to assign per-expert bit-widths under a given budget. Extensive experiments show that MODE is particularly well-suited for MoE-MLLMs, limiting average performance loss to within 2.9% at W3A16, with larger gains at the extreme 2-bit setting.