TENP: Trapezoidal Expert Neuron Pruning For Mixture-of-Experts

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models deliver high capacity at low per-token compute, but deploying them cheaply requires compressing their many expert weight matrices. Expert pruning (e.g., REAP) and merging reduce cost but sacrifice accuracy and require retraining the router; low-rank delta decomposition of experts (e.g., D^2-MoE) preserves all experts and the router, but degrades sharply as the expert count grows because a single shared component cannot approximate many near-orthogonal experts. Because MoE expert weights are near-orthogonal, a single shared component (as in prior delta decomposition) scales poorly with the expert count; we show that experts nonetheless organize into functional co-activation communities that are decoupled from weight similarity. Building on this, we introduce LorExperts, a router-preserving compression method that clusters experts, keeps one full-precision dominant per cluster, and represents the remaining members as low-rank corrections to their local dominant. LorExperts retains all experts and the original router (no router retraining). At ~50% expert compression on Qwen3-30B-A3B and Gemma-4-26B-A4B, LorExperts preserves downstream accuracy and perplexity better than the baselines on most of the tasks; the margin over D^2-MoE grows with expert count E. We further give a reconstruction fine-tuning procedure for LorExperts, and BTExperts, a tree organization of dominants and corrections that enables inference-time amortization of shared computation.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models suffer from large parameter counts, which create a significant memory bottleneck. Expert pruning is the most direct approach for reducing this parameter count, yet existing methods make pruning decisions for each expert independently, and assume experts' contributions are purely additive. In reality, expert usage in MoEs is inherently cooperative. We derive HOPE (Higher-Order Pruning of Experts), a second-order pruning objective which provably minimizes an upper bound on the error resulting from pruning. We show that REAP (a state-of-the-art first-order pruning method) is a special case of HOPE where interaction terms are ignored. Across three frontier MoE models (up to 122B parameters), two distinct calibration sets, and multiple benchmarks (including math, instruction following, coding, and an agentic suite), we demonstrate that HOPE produces better pruning decisions than existing methods, and its advantage is most pronounced at high pruning rates and on challenging agentic workloads. At 50% pruning, HOPE outperforms all baselines and achieves an average rank of 1.58 out of 5 methods (versus 2.42 for the next-best method, REAP), with gains of up to +6.1% on agentic coding. Over all conditions, HOPE again achieves the best average rank and surpasses every other method in the majority of head-to-head comparisons. By preserving cooperative expert structure that first-order methods ignore, HOPE enables aggressive compression with minimal degradation, particularly on complex tasks where diverse expert combinations are invoked over long sequences.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models scale model ability with sparsely activated experts, making this architecture a standard recipe for modern large models. However, sparse activation does not remove the deployment burden of storing and serving all experts, and the available deployment budget can vary substantially across devices, users, and workloads. Existing MoE compression methods are still largely fixed-budget, typically optimizing one compressed endpoint at each chosen target budget. We study a different setting: converting a large pretrained MoE LLM into a nested family of deployable subnetworks across budgets. Our method first ranks expert FFN channels by their importance, then lets each expert learn a discrete action to prune its channels. By gradually increasing cost pressure, a single action-training run exports a series of action masks from high to low budgets, each of which identifies a reliable smaller subnetwork nested in the ranked base model. Moreover, we use a single recovery fine-tune at a mid pruning budget (40%) to recover degraded model quality and transfer the recovered model to other unseen budgets. Overall, our framework surpasses recent MoE compression baselines. Specifically, on Qwen2-57B-A14B, our method retains ~99.8% of base performance while pruning 50% of routed expert parameters even without fine-tuning. For deployment, our pruned subnetworks deliver real memory reduction and throughput gains, and further support realtime online budget switching with kernel-level co-design.