UniMoMo: Expert Merging-Based MoE Acceleration for Large Recommendation Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models reduce per-token computation but still require storing and serving all experts, making deployment memory-intensive. Existing post-training compression methods mainly shrink this cost by pruning experts or merging their weights. We formulate post-training MoE compression as expert-pool consolidation: retaining a smaller set of pretrained experts as reusable prototypes and deterministically remapping each original expert reference to one selected prototype. This view separates the reduced expert pool from the reuse structure that represents the original expert slots, and allows prototype sharing within local layer scopes while preserving the original router interface. We propose ConMoE, a train-free prototype remapping framework that selects retained experts using calibration-based contribution and replaceability signals, then redirects original expert calls to the selected prototypes without weight updates or post-compression fine-tuning. Experiments on three pretrained MoE language models show that ConMoE matches or outperforms strong pruning and merging baselines in several settings, achieving the best average score on deepseek-moe-16b-base at both 25% and 50% routed-expert reduction, while remaining competitive on Qwen3-30B-A3B and OLMoE-1B-7B-0125. Ablations indicate that deterministic reassignment is the most stable component, whereas broader cross-layer sharing and post-hoc weight fusion are model-dependent.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have shown strong potential in scaling language models efficiently by activating only a small subset of experts per input. However, their widespread deployment remains limited due to the high memory overhead associated with storing all expert parameters, particularly as the number of experts increases. To address this challenge, prior works have explored expert dropping and merging strategies, yet they often suffer from performance drop at high compression ratios. In this paper, we introduce PuzzleMoE, a training-free MoE compression method that achieves both high accuracy and efficient inference through two key innovations: First, PuzzleMoE performs sparse expert merging by identifying element-wise weight redundancy and specialization. It uses a dual-mask to capture both shared and expert-specific parameters. Second, to avoid the overhead of storing binary masks and signs, PuzzleMoE introduces a bit-packed encoding scheme that reuses underutilized exponent bits, enabling efficient MoE inference on GPUs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PuzzleMoE can compress MoE models by up to 50% while maintaining accuracy across various tasks. Specifically, it outperforms prior MoE compression methods by up to 16.7% on MMLU at 50% compression ratio, and achieves up to 1.28\times inference speedup.

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.