Unchosen Experts Can Contribute Too: Unleashing MoE Models' Power by Self-Contrast

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has emerged as a prominent architecture for scaling model size while maintaining computational efficiency. In MoE, each token in the input sequence activates a different subset of experts determined by a routing mechanism. However, the unchosen experts in MoE models do not contribute to the output, potentially leading to underutilization of the model's capacity. In this work, we first conduct exploratory studies to demonstrate that increasing the number of activated experts does not necessarily improve and can even degrade the output quality. Then, we show that output distributions from an MoE model using different routing strategies substantially differ, indicating that different experts do not always act synergistically. Motivated by these findings, we propose Self-Contrast Mixture-of-Experts (SCMoE), a training-free strategy that utilizes unchosen experts in a self-contrast manner during inference. In SCMoE, the next-token probabilities are determined by contrasting the outputs from strong and weak activation using the same MoE model. Our method is conceptually simple and computationally lightweight, as it incurs minimal latency compared to greedy decoding. Experiments on several benchmarks (GSM8K, StrategyQA, MBPP and HumanEval) demonstrate that SCMoE can consistently enhance Mixtral 8x7B's reasoning capability across various domains. For example, it improves the accuracy on GSM8K from 61.79 to 66.94. Moreover, combining SCMoE with self-consistency yields additional gains, increasing major@20 accuracy from 75.59 to 78.31.

Paper

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Peer review

Reviewer Vqkj7/10 · confidence 4/52024-06-15

Summary

This paper proposes a training-free strategy that utilizes unchosen experts in a self-contrast manner during inference. It can be seen as a decoding method utilizing divergent information from different routing strategies. This method introduces slightly more latency overhead and improves the performance of various tasks through experimental evaluation.

Strengths

* The paper is well put together with clear insights and well-articulated motivation. * The problem studied in the paper is well-motivated, it is known that expert selection in MoE is not trivial. * The idea is novel, and the illustration of the methodology is easy to follow.

Weaknesses

* This inference method employs two models, one with top-2 routing and the other with rank-k routing. It produces double memory overhead which is significant, especially for larger models. * The choosing of α in Equation 6. seems non-trivial, it would be great to provide some insight on this.

Questions

* The extra latency cost is minor, is it because the two-model inference is parallelly implemented? * The “+2=5 (...)” in Figure 2.(c) is a little bit confusing to me, could you explain further about it?

Rating

7

Confidence

4

Soundness

2

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

Yes.

Reviewer cUsK8/10 · confidence 4/52024-06-25

Summary

This paper proposes a novel approach called Self-Contrast Mixture-of-Experts (SCMoE) to improve the utilization and performance of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. The key contributions are: 1. Exploratory studies showing that increasing the number of activated experts in MoE models does not always improve output quality and that different routing strategies lead to substantially different output distributions. 2. The SCMoE method, which leverages unchosen experts in a self-contrast manner during inference. It determines next-token probabilities by contrasting outputs from strong and weak activation using the same MoE model. 3. Experimental results demonstrating that SCMoE consistently enhances the reasoning capabilities of Mixtral 8x7B across various domains. 4. Combining SCMoE with self-consistency yields further gains. 5. The proposed SCMoE method is conceptually simple, computationally lightweight, and incurs minimal latency compared to greedy decoding.

Strengths

1. The paper is well-motivated through exploratory studies, showing that simply increasing the number of activated experts in MoE LLMs can harm performance and that expert models tend to inhibit rather than strengthen each other. 2. The proposed SCMoE method is simple and intuitive, using the difference between the logits of stronger and weaker models. This approach incurs minimal performance overhead and is straightforward to implement. 3. Despite its simplicity, SCMoE consistently yields performance gains on evaluation benchmarks, showcasing its effectiveness. 4. The selected set of evaluation tasks, while not extensive, includes representative tasks from the most important domains of LLM applications, making the experimental results meaningful and easy to interpret. The study also examines multiple mainstream MoE LLMs, such as Mixtral and DeepSeekMoE. 5. The paper is well-written and well-presented.

Weaknesses

1. The idea of SCMoE is somewhat similar to the cited paper "Contrastive decoding: Open-ended text generation as optimization (Li et. al. [20])," although I understand that SCMoE is better adapted to MoE LLMs and has lots of novelties in other aspects. The authors could provide more discussion in the related work section about the similarities and differences between the two approaches. 2. The paper lacks clarity on how certain hyperparameters are chosen. For example, in Section 3.2, the authors state that "for the weak activation, we only consider the rank-k routing with k=2" but do not provide an explanation for why k cannot be 3, 4, or 5. It would be helpful to know if choosing k=2 is motivated by faster inference times, as the top 2 models will be used regardless.

Questions

1. See Weakness 2. 2. I am curious why Mixtral has decreased performance when averaging over more expert models. Could the authors give some explanations? It is because of something specific to pretraining methodology of Mixtral/DeepSeekMoE models?

Rating

8

Confidence

4

Soundness

4

Presentation

4

Contribution

4

Limitations

N/A

Reviewer bydP6/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-21

Summary

This paper introduces SCMoE, a decoding time algorithm which can be applied off the shelf to boost MoE models' performance by contrasting the chosen experts in strong and weak activations. Experiment results show that this algorithm has an empirical advantage over baselines methods in coding, commonsense knowledge, and math benchmarks.

Strengths

Originality:  This paper proposes an original method in MoE decoding. The method is straightforward to understand and easy to deploy.  Quality:  This paper is of high quality. The paper is well written with good demonstrations and clear math. The proposed method shows better performance across all presented benchmarks compared to baseline methods.  Clarity:  As discussed in the last point, this paper is very clear in idea demonstration and methodology illustration. Experiment results are also well organized.  Significance:  This paper is significant in contributing to the after-training development of MoE models.

Weaknesses

1. Commonsense reasoning in StrategyQA, which is a multi-hop reasoning dataset about world knowledge, does not seem to be so strongly related to coding and math which requires formal reasoning compared to formal logic (see [1], which mainly focuses on logic, algorithm, and math as reasoning tasks). Do you anticipate performance boost in logic reasoning tasks?  2. Relatedly to the last question, do you think the proposed algorithm will also help general world knowledge reasoning without implicit complex reasoning chains such as MMLU?  3. Is it possible to find the ideal strong activation in real-life workflows only given the user query? [1] Zhu, K., Chen, J., Wang, J., Gong, N. Z., Yang, D., & Xie, X. (2023). Dyval: Dynamic evaluation of large language models for reasoning tasks. In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations.

Questions

See above

Rating

6

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

4

Contribution

3

Limitations

The authors briefly mentioned limitations of their paper in the conclusion section but they could further discuss other limitations including limitation of datasets evaluated etc.

Reviewer KVjj6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-21

Summary

The paper explores to leverage the contrastive information existing between different routing strategies of the MoE model to facilitate a better token decoding during inference in a training-free fashion. The paper is built upon two interesting observations: (1) increasing the number of activated experts does not necessarily improve and can even degrade the output quality (which increases and then drops might be due to noise/irrelevancy of other experts). (2) output distributions from an MoE model using different routing strategies substantially differ (which is obvious due to pre-training setting with a routing strategy). More specifically, for ScMoE the next-token probabilities are determined by contrasting the outputs from strong and weak activation using the same MoE mode. The authors conducted experiments using Mixtral on GSM8K, StrategyQA, MBPP and HumanEval and illustrate some noticeable performance benefits on GSM8K.

Strengths

The paper brings several interesting strength to community: 1. The U-shape performance and top-k routing policy is indeed interesting and changing k wrt. dataset for best performance can encourage MoE designs with adaptive inference based on task difficulty. 2. The authors proposal to estimate next-token probabilities by contrasting the outputs from strong and weak activation using the same MoE model is interesting and I am surprised to see the impressive performance gain (>5 points) on GSM8K. 3. The authors presents some findings (ln. 111-120 and Appendix) as well as a comprehensive ablation experiments which make the paper well-grounded and comprehensive. 4. The author additionally include some latency related issues which is the major bottleneck of their proposed method.

Weaknesses

While the paper is well-written and comprehensive, I have following comments/questions/concerns related to the paper: 1. One question- the author submitted numbers for Mixtral default routing strategy seems to be far from the numbers reported by the Mistral authors (Table 2 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.04088). What could be the possible reason for that (curiosity and not a negative point)? 2. The author must perform the memory bottleneck for storing additional activations for their purpose of using two multiple routing strategy in SCMoE. I believe the memory bottleneck (as well as latency) of decoding will be substantially high while dealing with long-context tasks. 3. I was wondering if the contrastive behavior can be enforced explicitly by using a small finetuning data and a contrastive loss? What are the authors thought about this? 4. What is the consistency of the findings KLD for reasoning tasks across some other math reasoning tasks apart from GSM8K? 5. Another major weakness of the work is the tuning of the hyperparameter `\beta` for every dataset? Can authors find some discover a single `\beta` which should work well enough for say a task category (math reasoning/commonsense). I still find the work interesting and willing to increase the score with fair discussion during rebuttal.

Questions

See above.

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

2

Presentation

3

Contribution

2

Limitations

See above.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-11

A Gentle Reminder

Dear Reviewer KVjj, Thank you once again for your constructive comments on our submission. Your feedback is really valuable to the improvement of our paper. As the discussion phase nears its conclusion, we eagerly await any further comments or questions you might have. We hope that our responses have adequately addressed your concerns. If you find our revisions satisfactory, we would greatly appreciate it if you could consider raising the score of your assessment. If there are still issues to be addressed, please let us know, and we would be more than happy to engage in further discussion.

Area Chair c9zc2024-08-12

Dear reviewer, Can you let the author and us know if you've read the rebuttal, and if you have any further comments? Thanks, AC

Reviewer KVjj2024-08-12

Response to Authors.

Thank you for the thorough response, I encourage you to polish the submitted version. I will raise my score.

Reviewer Vqkj2024-08-10

Thank the authors for their answers to my concerns. They have adequately answered every question I raised to my satisfaction, and therefore, I will keep my current score of an acceptance.

Reviewer bydP2024-08-11

Thank you for addressing my concerns! I’ll keep my positive score for the paper.

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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