#mixture-of-experts

Aug 4, 2025 · Mixture of Experts

In the pursuit of scaling neural networks to unprecedented parameter counts while maintaining computational tractability, the paradigm of conditional computation has emerged as a cornerstone of modern deep learning architectures. A prominent and highly successful incarnation of this principle is the Mixture of Experts (MoE) layer. At its core, an MoE model eschews the monolithic, dense activation of traditional networks, wherein every parameter is engaged for every input. Instead, it employs a collection of specialized subnetworks, termed experts, and dynamically selects a sparse combination of these experts to process each input token. This approach allows for a dramatic increase in model capacity without a commensurate rise in computational cost (FLOPs), as only a fraction of the network's parameters are utilized for any given forward pass.