Xingyuan Ding
Author directory2026
Less is MoE: Trimming Experts in Domain-Specialist Language Models
Haoze He | Xinkai Zou | Xuan Jiang | Xingyuan Ding | Ao Qu | Juncheng B Li | Heather Miller
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Haoze He | Xinkai Zou | Xuan Jiang | Xingyuan Ding | Ao Qu | Juncheng B Li | Heather Miller
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models achieve strong performance through conditional computation, but their large parameter footprint poses deployment challenges. Prior MoE compression approaches catastrophically fail when evaluated on general-purpose benchmarks beyond commonsense reasoning. We trace this failure to the granularity of compression: important capabilities are distributed across experts but concentrated in FFN sparse intermediate dimensions. To identify these dimensions, we use Fisher importance which outperforms activation-, router-score-, and magnitude-based alternatives, and identifies tiny sets of task-critical dimensions: in Qwen1.5-MoE, removing as few as 12 of 2.03M routed-FFN intermediate dimensions collapses GSM8K accuracy while largely preserving factual-knowledge performance. Building on this, we propose Fisher-MoE, which operates within FFN to remove intermediate dimensions ranked by Fisher importance. At the same 50% MoE compression ratio, Fisher-MoE preserves model capability, while reducing weight memory by ~45% and improving inference throughput by 21%. These findings suggest intermediate dimension granularity is an effective unit for both compression and ranking where capability concentrates in MoE models. Our implementation is available in an anonymous repository.