SPRI: SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization for Data-Constrained MoE Upcycling

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become the dominant architecture for scaling large language models: frontier models routinely decouple total parameters from per-token computation through sparse expert routing. Scaling laws show that under fixed active computation, model quality scales predictably with total parameters, and MoEs realize this by increasing expert count. However, training large MoEs is expensive, as memory requirements and inter-device communication both scale with total parameter count. We propose expert upcycling, a method for progressively expanding MoE capacity by increasing the number of experts during continued pre-training (CPT). Given a trained E-expert model, the upcycling operator constructs an mE-expert model through expert duplication and router extension while holding top-K routing fixed, preserving per-token inference cost. Duplication provides a warm initialization: the expanded model inherits the source checkpoint's learned representations, starting from a substantially lower loss than random initialization. Subsequent CPT then breaks the symmetry among duplicated experts to drive specialization. We formalize the upcycling operator and develop a theoretical framework decomposing the quality gap into a capacity term and an initialization term. We further introduce utility-based expert selection, which uses gradient-based importance scores to guide non-uniform duplication, more than tripling gap closure when CPT is limited. In our 7B-13B total parameter experiments, the upcycled model matches the fixed-size baseline on validation loss while saving 32% of GPU hours. Comprehensive ablations across model scales, activation ratios, MoE architectures, and training budgets yield a practical recipe for deploying expert upcycling, establishing it as a principled, compute-efficient alternative to training large MoE models from scratch.

We present Marco-MoE, a suite of fully open multilingual sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. Marco-MoE features a highly sparse design in which only around 5% of the total parameters are activated per input token. This extreme sparsity, combined with upcycling from dense models, enables efficient pre-training on 5T tokens. Our models surpass similarly-sized competitors on English and multilingual benchmarks, achieving a best-in-class performance-to-compute ratio. We further post-train these models to create Marco-MoE-\textsc{Instruct} variants, which surpass the performance of competing models possessing $3$--$14\times$ more activated parameters. Our analysis reveals that Marco-MoE learns structured expert activation patterns shared across related languages, while maintaining highly specialized utilization for linguistically isolated ones. We further show that Marco-MoE allows for scalable language expansion without the interference typical of dense models. To support the community, we disclose our full training datasets, recipes, and model weights.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale capacity without proportional compute cost and have become a key architecture for frontier large language models (LLMs). Yet domain-specific post-training inherits an expert pool shaped by mixed-domain pre-training: a substantial subset of experts contributes little on the target domain, and standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) leaves the composition of this pool unchanged. We propose a simple, budget-preserving pipeline that realigns the expert pool to the target domain before fine-tuning. Given a target domain, we (1) prune the experts with lowest domain-aligned saliency, (2) regrow the expert pool to its original size through perturbation-based expert expansion, and (3) apply standard SFT. The resulting model preserves the original expert count, parameter count, and inference cost. With a single frozen recipe and no per-domain hyperparameter tuning, UMoE consistently improves over direct sft across two MoE architectures (Qwen3-30B-A3B and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B), five domains (math, code, science, tool-use, and agentic coding), and 12 benchmarks. Representative improvements are 3.4 points in math average accuracy, 6.0 points on SWE-bench Verified. On a strong in-house math corpus, direct sft already surpasses Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking (82.81 vs.\ 81.06), yet UMoE further raises the average to 84.17, an additional 1.36 points, demonstrating robustness to a substantially stronger SFT regime. Data-scaling experiments further show that the gain persists as training data grows. Analysis reveals that the direct-SFT model allocates substantial routed-expert compute to a low-saliency subset that can be removed post hoc with little average degradation; UMoE turns this redundant capacity into useful domain capacity and achieves lower training loss, with gains spanning all difficulty levels in downstream evaluation.