Efficient Quantization of Mixture-of-Experts with Theoretical Generalization Guarantees

Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models (MoE-LLMs) achieve strong performance but incur substantial memory overhead due to massive expert parameters. Mixed-precision quantization mitigates this cost by allocating expert-wise bit-widths based on their importance, approaching the accuracy-memory Pareto frontier and enabling extreme low-bit quantization. However, existing methods rely on layer-wise importance estimation and overlook router shifts induced by quantization, resulting in suboptimal allocation and routing. In this work, we propose Global Expert-level Mixed-precision Quantization (GEMQ) to overcome these limitations via (1) a global linear-programming formulation that captures model-wide expert importance based on quantization error analysis, and (2) efficient router fine-tuning to adapt routing to quantized experts. These components are integrated into a progressive quantization framework that iteratively refines importance estimation and allocation. Experiments demonstrate that GEMQ significantly reduces memory and accelerates inference with minimal accuracy degradation. Source code is available at https://github.com/jndeng/GEMQ .

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures scale model capacity through sparse expert activation, but their deployment remains memory-bound because all expert weights must reside in memory. Mixed-precision quantization can substantially reduce this footprint by assigning different bit-widths to different experts. Existing approaches, however, typically rely on calibration data to estimate expert importance and determine bit allocation. For frontier MoE LLMs, the original training data, and hence the true training distribution, is proprietary and inaccessible. As a result, calibration sets are inevitably imperfect surrogates, and this can misestimate expert utilization and lead to suboptimal bit allocation. Motivated by the substantial cross-expert quality variability observed in modern MoE models, and by the success of Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HT-SR) theory at predicting neural network model quality without access to training or testing data, we propose AlphaQ, a calibration-free bit-allocation method for MoE quantization. AlphaQ draws on HT-SR theory and follows a simple principle: experts with more heavy-tailed weight spectra are typically better trained and hence should receive higher bit-widths, while experts with weaker heavy-tailed structure can be quantized more aggressively. AlphaQ operationalizes this principle by measuring expert-wise spectral heavy-tailedness and solving a budget-constrained optimization problem that minimizes total quantization error under a global bit-budget constraint. Across several MoE models, AlphaQ consistently outperforms calibration-based baselines under matched bit budgets. Notably, on Qwen1.5-MoE, AlphaQ achieves near full-precision accuracy with an average expert precision of only 3.5 bits, while delivering more than 4$\times$ memory compression. Our code is available at https://github.com/Superone77/AlphaQ.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a practical architecture for scaling LLM capacity while keeping per-token compute modest, but deploying MoE models on a single, memory-limited GPU remains difficult because expert weights dominate the HBM footprint. Existing expert offloading and prefetching systems reduce the resident set, yet they often pay expert-loading costs on the critical path when activation becomes dense. Post-training quantization (PTQ) lowers the footprint without transfers, but prevailing pipelines fix expert bit-widths offline and assume routing remains stable, even though MoE expert utilization is heavy-tailed and the hot set can shift across workloads. We present DynaExq, a runtime-aware mixed-precision serving system that treats single-GPU MoE inference under a hard HBM envelope as an online, budget-constrained precision allocation problem. The key insight is to keep the experts that dominate runtime traffic resident at higher precision, while maintaining a low-precision fallback for the remaining experts, so the system can reduce transfer volume and avoid the waiting latency that limits offloading and prefetching under dense activation. DynaExq estimates long-horizon expert hotness from router traces, selects a per-layer high-precision resident set via a budget-feasible top-$n$ rule, and applies promotions and demotions asynchronously through stable expert handles so the forward pass always executes on a fully materialized expert version. Across Qwen3-MoE-30B/80B and six benchmarks, DynaExq improves accuracy over static PTQ on Qwen3-80B (73.09% to 77.57%) under comparable device-memory budgets and achieves up to 2.73x higher throughput than offloading/prefetch baselines at batch size 32.