Yuantian Shao
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.
2025
EAC-MoE: Expert-Selection Aware Compressor for Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models
Yuanteng Chen | Yuantian Shao | Peisong Wang | Jian Cheng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuanteng Chen | Yuantian Shao | Peisong Wang | Jian Cheng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has demonstrated promising potential in scaling LLMs. However, it is hindered by two critical challenges: (1) substantial GPU memory consumption to load all experts; (2) low activated parameters cannot be equivalently translated into inference acceleration effects. In this work, we propose EAC-MoE, an Expert-Selection Aware Compressor for MoE-LLMs, which deeply aligns with the characteristics of MoE from the perspectives of quantization and pruning, and introduces two modules to address these two challenges respectively: (1) The expert selection bias caused by low-bit quantization is a major factor contributing to the performance degradation in MoE-LLMs. Based on this, we propose Quantization with Expert-Selection Calibration (QESC), which mitigates the expert selection bias by calibrating the routers within the MoE; (2) There are always certain experts that are not crucial for the corresponding tasks, yet causing inference latency. Therefore, we propose Pruning based on Expert-Selection Frequency (PESF), which significantly improves inference speed by pruning less frequently used experts for current task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces memory usage and improves inference speed with minimal performance degradation.