Approximation Rates and VC-Dimension Bounds for (P)ReLU MLP Mixture of Experts
On the map: Mixture-of-experts → MoE theory and gating functions
Abstract (arXiv)
Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) can scale up beyond traditional deep learning models by employing a routing strategy in which each input is processed by a single "expert" deep learning model. This strategy allows us to scale up the number of parameters defining the MoE while maintaining sparse activation, i.e., MoEs only load a small number of their total parameters into GPU VRAM for the forward pass depending on the input. In this paper, we provide an approximation and learning-theoretic analysis of mixtures of expert MLPs with (P)ReLU activation functions. We first prove that for every error level varepsilon>0 and every Lipschitz function f:[0,1]n→ ℝ, one can construct a MoMLP model (a Mixture-of-Experts comprising of (P)ReLU MLPs) which uniformly approximates f to varepsilon accuracy over [0,1]n, while only requiring networks of O(varepsilon-1) parameters to be loaded in memory. Additionally, we show that MoMLPs can generalize since the entire MoMLP model has a (finite) VC dimension of tildeO(LmaxnL,JW), if there are L experts and each expert has a depth and width of J and W, respectively.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in MoE theory and gating functions, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts. Builds on 55 of its 99 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2024.
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