Yizhe Xiong

Zhenpeng Su, Zijia Lin, Xue Bai et al.

Scaling the size of a model enhances its capabilities but significantly increases computation complexity. Mixture-of-Experts models (MoE) address the issue by allowing model size to scale up without substantially increasing training or inference costs. In MoE, there is an important module called the router, which is used to distribute each token to the experts. Currently, the mainstream routing methods include dynamic routing and fixed routing. Despite their promising results, MoE models encounter several challenges. Primarily, for dynamic routing methods, the dispersion of training tokens across multiple experts can lead to underfitting, particularly for infrequent tokens. Additionally, though fixed routing methods can mitigate that issue, they compromise on the diversity of representations. In this paper, we propose \textbf{MaskMoE}, a method designed to enhance token-level learning by employing a routing \textbf{mask}ing technique within the \textbf{M}ixture-\textbf{o}f-\textbf{E}xperts model. MaskMoE is capable of maintaining representation diversity while achieving more comprehensive training. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms previous dominant Mixture-of-Experts models in terms of both perplexity (PPL) and downstream task performance.

Zhenpeng Su, Xing Wu, Zijia Lin et al.

Large language models (LLM) have been attracting much attention from the community recently, due to their remarkable performance in all kinds of downstream tasks. According to the well-known scaling law, scaling up a dense LLM enhances its capabilities, but also significantly increases the computational complexity. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models address that by allowing the model size to grow without substantially raising training or inference costs. Yet MoE models face challenges regarding knowledge sharing among experts, making their performance somehow sensitive to routing accuracy. To tackle that, previous works introduced shared experts and combined their outputs with those of the top $K$ routed experts in an ``addition'' manner. In this paper, inspired by collective matrix factorization to learn shared knowledge among data, we propose CartesianMoE, which implements more effective knowledge sharing among experts in more like a ``multiplication'' manner. Extensive experimental results indicate that CartesianMoE outperforms previous MoE models for building LLMs, in terms of both perplexity and downstream task performance. And we also find that CartesianMoE achieves better expert routing robustness.

Haoran Lian, Yizhe Xiong, Jianwei Niu et al.

Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) serves as a foundation method for text tokenization in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. Despite its wide adoption, the original BPE algorithm harbors an inherent flaw: it inadvertently introduces a frequency imbalance for tokens in the text corpus. Since BPE iteratively merges the most frequent token pair in the text corpus to generate a new token and keeps all generated tokens in the vocabulary, it unavoidably holds tokens that primarily act as components of a longer token and appear infrequently on their own. We term such tokens as Scaffold Tokens. Due to their infrequent occurrences in the text corpus, Scaffold Tokens pose a learning imbalance issue. To address that issue, we propose Scaffold-BPE, which incorporates a dynamic scaffold token removal mechanism by parameter-free, computation-light, and easy-to-implement modifications to the original BPE method. This novel approach ensures the exclusion of low-frequency Scaffold Tokens from the token representations for given texts, thereby mitigating the issue of frequency imbalance and facilitating model training. On extensive experiments across language modeling and even machine translation, Scaffold-BPE consistently outperforms the original BPE, well demonstrating its effectiveness.