# Dynamic Mixture of Experts: An Auto-Tuning Approach for Efficient Transformer Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14297 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14297/

## Key facts

- Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Expert routing strategies, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 52 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2024.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Expert routing strategies](https://mlsanity.com/moe/expert-routing-strategies/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [In Search of Lost Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01434/) (2020)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Neural Network Acceptability Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12471/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06066/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [A Survey on Mixture of Experts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06204/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Inference Optimization Techniques for Mixture of Experts Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14219/) (2024)
- [Advancing Expert Specialization for Better MoE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22323/) (2025)
- [Lynx: Enabling Efficient MoE Inference through Dynamic Batch-Aware Expert Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08982/) (2024)
- [TroL: Traversal of Layers for Large Language and Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12246/) (2024)
- [Expert Race: A Flexible Routing Strategy for Scaling Diffusion Transformer with Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16057/) (2025)
- [TimeExpert: An Expert-Guided Video LLM for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01699/) (2025)
- [LD-MoLE: Learnable Dynamic Routing for Mixture of LoRA Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25684/) (2025)
- [Solving Token Gradient Conflict in Mixture-of-Experts for Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19905/) (2024)
- [MoDES: Accelerating Mixture-of-Experts Multimodal Large Language Models via Dynamic Expert Skipping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15690/) (2025)
- [HiMoE-VLA: Hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts for Generalist Vision-Language-Action Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05693/) (2025)
- [Grove MoE: Towards Efficient and Superior MoE LLMs with Adjugate Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07785/) (2025)
- [Tight Clusters Make Specialized Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15315/) (2025)
- [LayerScope: Predictive Cross-Layer Scheduling for Efficient Multi-Batch MoE Inference on Legacy Servers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23638/) (2025)
- [Long-Tailed Distribution-Aware Router For Mixture-of-Experts in Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01351/) (2025)
- [Training Matryoshka Mixture-of-Experts for Elastic Inference-Time Expert Utilization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26520/) (2025)
- [LExI: Layer-Adaptive Active Experts for Efficient MoE Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02753/) (2025)
- [Route Experts by Sequence, not by Token](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06494/) (2025)
- [Large Language Model Sourcing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10161/) (2025)
- [Synergistic Intra- and Cross-Layer Regularization Losses for MoE Expert Specialization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14159/) (2026)
- [LaDiMo: Layer-wise Distillation Inspired MoEfier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04278/) (2024)
- [MoME: Mixture of Matryoshka Experts for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04136/) (2025)
- [How Many Experts Are Enough? Towards Optimal Semantic Specialization for Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19765/) (2025)
- [Post-Trained MoE Can Skip Half Experts via Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18643/) (2026)
- [Expert-Token Resonance MoE: Bidirectional Routing with Efficiency Affinity-Driven Active Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00023/) (2024)
- [DTop-p MoE: Sparsity-Controlled Dynamic Top-p MoE for Foundation Model Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13996/) (2025)
- [Expert Threshold Routing for Autoregressive Language Modeling with Dynamic Computation Allocation and Load Balancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11535/) (2026)
- [Monkey Jump : MoE-Style PEFT for Efficient Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06356/) (2026)
- [On Token's Dilemma: Dynamic MoE with Drift-Aware Token Assignment for Continual Learning of Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27481/) (2026)
- [Cluster Topology-Driven Placement of Experts Reduces Network Traffic in MoE Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09229/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) has been widely employed to enhance the efficiency of training and inference for Transformer-based foundational models, yielding promising results.However, the performance of SMoE heavily depends on the choice of hyper-parameters, such as the number of experts and the number of experts to be activated (referred to as top-k), resulting in significant computational overhead due to the extensive model training by searching over various hyper-parameter configurations. As a remedy, we introduce the Dynamic Mixture of Experts (DynMoE) technique. DynMoE incorporates (1) a novel gating method that enables each token to automatically determine the number of experts to activate. (2) An adaptive process automatically adjusts the number of experts during training. Extensive numerical results across Vision, Language, and Vision-Language tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to achieve competitive performance compared to GMoE for vision and language tasks, and MoE-LLaVA for vision-language tasks, while maintaining efficiency by activating fewer parameters. Our code is available at https://github.com/LINs-lab/DynMoE.